Healing for me is being able to sit next to the butcher and say 'Yes, I’m sitting next to the butcher now,' instead of saying 'there is no butcher'.
Tori AmosRead
There are things that I refuse to deal with except through my music... because I don't trust humanity that much, and I don't know if I trust me that much. But I trust the songs.
Interpretation
This quote expresses the belief that music can serve as a safe means to process emotions and experiences.
Tori Amos suggests that she uses music as a medium to navigate her feelings and experiences because of a deep-seated skepticism towards humanity and herself. This indicates that, amidst uncertainty and distrust, she finds solace and reliability in the artistic expression of her songs, thereby highlighting the therapeutic power of music.
In practice
In a speech about creativity at a local arts festival, one might quote this to emphasize the power of music.
Healing for me is being able to sit next to the butcher and say 'Yes, I’m sitting next to the butcher now,' instead of saying 'there is no butcher'.
When you stop putting yourself on the line, and you don't touch your own heart, how do you expect to touch other people?
If you can't create physical life, you find a life force. If that's in music, that's in music. I started to find this deep, primitive rhythm, and I started to move to it. And I held hands with sorrow, and I danced with her, and we giggled a bit.
I don't want to sit on the sidelines and not value the gift of being here. Instead of the idea of time ticking away, the grains of sand running out, I try to think of time as giving me another grain of sand, another gift. So time passing is an accumulation, rather than a diminishing.
I don't mind a dirty girl. But what I find tragic is when we, as women, become not the subject of our own story but someone else's object.
For many years, I shut down that place inside myself that needed to rage, cry, ask questions and basically just express herself. I made a conscious choice when I put (the song) 'Me and a Gun' on the record not to stay a victim anymore.
If you write fiction, you have to love your characters. It's like your family. You don't have to like them, but you have to love them.
Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.
I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.
Music washes away the dust of every day life.
Who knows if the moon's / a balloon, coming out of a keen city / in the sky - filled with pretty people?
Where words leave off, music begins.
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