Best 76 quotes of Joan Baez on MyQuotes

All of us are survivors, but how many of us transcend survival?

And my voice now is a struggle, it's a daily struggle to keep it up. Gravity has begun to fight the vocal cords the way it does with everybody. So I have a vocal therapist, and we record the sessions and I use them on tour every day.

As long as one keeps searching, the answers will come.

As long as we keep searching, the answers come.

Back then I was still listening to rhythm and blues, and my aunt took me to see a Pete Seeger concert. And it gelled. He made all the sense in the world to me. I got addicted to his albums, and then Belafonte and Odetta - they were the people who seemed to fuse things that were important to me into music. I think Pete the most because he did what he did to the point where he took those enormous risks and then paid for them.

"Diamonds & Rust" started off as another song. Then the words started to morph. When you write a song that deep, the words come from some place else. But when the songs stop coming, it would be so contrived to try and force it. Since then I've just been doing other people's music.

During the 'ballad' years for me, the politics was latent; I was just falling in love with the ballads and my boyfriend. And there was the beauty of the songs.

Hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.

I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.

I didn't study anything really. I didn't learn out of the books because I couldn't read music very well, so it is what they say it is - you learn from other people. And my cohorts and I would sneak around the coffee shops and hear stuff we wanted to learn, and then you ask whoever was playing it to teach you.

I don't think of myself as a symbol of the sixties, but I do think of myself as a symbol of following through on your beliefs.

If it came back I would be thrilled. I would be delighted to write more songs. I need them now because I want to make an album and I have to depend on other people's music, which I've done for years. But still, it'd be really nice to be able to sprinkle it with my own.

If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?

If people have to put labels on me, I'd prefer the first label to be human being, the second label to be pacifist, and the third to be folk singer.

If you're gonna sing meaningful songs, you have to be committed to living a life that backs that up.

If you swing both ways, you really swing. I just figure you double your pleasure.

I have been true to the principles of nonviolence, developing a stronger and stronger aversion to the ideologies of both the far right and the far left and a deeper sense of rage and sorrow over the suffering they continue to produce all over the world.

I have hope in people, in individuals. Because you don't know what's going to rise from the ruins.

I love the lower ranges of my new voice. I really enjoy that. It's a challenge, and I accept the challenge. I sort of enjoy it now to reach notes that maybe four years ago I couldn't reach. I don't mean to grumble about it. I'm past that critical period and have gone on to a whole new field. And we go everywhere. We travel around the world, and I learn songs from every place we go, and it's a joyful process.

I'm a badass. I really am. When you see me hanging with Snoop Doggy Dogg, I am perfectly at home and comfortable.

I'm not a rock and roller, a hitmaker. I'm highly dependent on what's coming out of these vocal cords.

I never pretended to be rock star. I would make a lousy rock star. I don't have the right voice for it. I don't have the "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll" spirit. But the greatest flattery in the last couple of years is being called a "badass" by young singers.

In other words, it is what I do in the world that matters. When I traveled for three months in the Mideast, the places I wanted to go back to were Turkey and the Gaza Strip. It has to do with what Gandhi said: he found God in the eyes of the poor. Those are the places which were so moving that they were just unbearable.

Instead of getting hard ourselves and trying to compete, women should try and give their best qualities to men - bring them softness, teach them how to cry.

In this society, we don't like to face the future and the dying process and all of it. Most of us really don't want to think about it, but it's facing me in the mirror every day.

I think I would have had an easier time of it if I had had training much earlier. Because when I got to the training, it was in my late 30s and I already probably had every bad habit a singer could have. In fact, it still goes on. It's un-training those habits and retraining new ones - the breathing, the relaxation, the tongue, the lungs, the everything.

I think the question that nobody wanted to deal with is the question they're posing: did my kid die in vain? Because the answer is too awful.

It [my vocal] didn't sound like what I wanted to hear; the vibrato isn't what I liked anymore. So I got myself to an ear, nose and throat guy who does a lot of work with singers, and I was hoping there was a big wart on my vocal cords or something and they could scrape it off and I could have the voice I wanted. But he said, "No, for 71, that's your voice.

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.

I've never had a humble opinion. If you've got an opinion, why be humble about it?

I was addicted to rhythm 'n' blues pretty much directly into folk music. I had my little 45s of mostly black artists. That was as close as I got. I've never listened to heavy rock or stuff that jangles my nerves, because I'm already jangled.

I wasn't popular in school, I was Mexican, I was all these inappropriate things. I started playing the ukulele and taking it to school, and I realized people liked listening to it. I would play it to comfort myself at home, and I'd play rhythm and blues songs that had four chords. That's how it started.

I was trying to disturb the war.

I went to jail for 11 days for disturbing the peace; I was trying to disturb the war.

I wish it was clear for me how it happened [stop writing songs], then maybe I could start writing again. But it's kind of an "it." It just submerged itself. Because the way I had always written was just that it came out. It just happened.

I would say that I'm a nonviolent soldier. In place of weapons of violence, you have to use your mind, your heart, your sense of humor, every faculty available to you...because no one has the right to take the life of another human being.

My dread is for my show to be a nostalgia act. So the key to it is how do we keep it fresh?

My father was a physicist and also an activist. My first public protest was with my dad at Stanford. I came by all that honestly.

My life is a crystal teardrop. There are snowflakes falling in the teardrop and little figures trudging in slow motion.

"Nasty Man" isn't a laughing matter, but you have to laugh anyway. The song, itself, becomes something of a laughing matter because we'd go crazy if we didn't keep laughing.

Nonviolence is a flop. The only bigger flop is violence.

Now I know I understand that it was Sgt. Pepper's Band, that put the sixties into song, where have all the heroes gone?

Only you and I can help the sun rise each coming morning. If we don't, it may drench itself out in sorrow.

Only you and I can help the sun rise each coming morning. If we don't, it may drench itself out in sorrow. You special, miraculous, unrepeatable, fragile, fearful, tender, lost, sparkling ruby emerald jewel, rainbow splendor person. It's up to you.

Peace might sell, but who's buying?

People say I'm such a pessimist, but I always was. It never stopped me from doing what I had to do. I would say I'm a realist.

Put tattoos all up and down our thighs, do anything our parents would despise. Take uppers, downers, blues, and reds and yellows, our brains are turning into jello.

Seeing you sleeping peacefully on your back among your stuffed ducks, bears and basset hounds, would remind me that no matter how good the next day might be, certain moments were gone forever because we could not go backwards in time.

Social change really cannot happen unless people are willing to take a risk, and they were. And I was so moved by that, and of course by the way that he spoke, that made a huge dent in my belief system and my spirit.

Somebody else does the rigor and then I listen. I have an assistant, and my manager, and other people who hunt and find and send it to me, and then I just figure out which ones I can do justice to.