Amanda Palmer Quotes

I have a handful of really close relationships in my life and I depend on those people heavily to carry me through and to help me stay steady.

One of the best things about Kickstarter and crowdfunding and the collapse of the music business is a lot of artists like me have been forced to face our own weird mess about ourselves and what we thought it meant to become musicians.

Everyone I know shares toothbrushes. Everyone I know sleeps on each other's floor. Everyone I know uses what they've got and shares what they've got.

Take on the pain and wear it as a shirt.

There are so many people, so many artists, so many magazines, so many theater companies, so many people trying to raise money for so many things that it's easy to look around and just feel powerless or helpless, because even if you have some resources, you can't help everybody.

It feels like it is a daily work and an ongoing task to undo all of the f - - g programming that I have had all my life about who I am supposed to be and how I'm supposed to look and that I'm supposed to win. It's a daily deconstruction of all that bullshit.

Nothing is crueller than children who come from good homes.

Our nature is to desperately want to believe and to take what we believe is the quickest path there even against our better judgment.

There's a part of me that is really, really happy with all of my success lately because of what it can get me and what it can buy me in the fact that my music will hopefully reach more people. But it also makes me a little bit miserable because the minute the spotlight is on you, people start flinging sh*t at you for whatever reason.

I think being a woman in any business that's dominated by men, you have your garden variety pros and cons, where you learn how to focus and harness your various powers and weaknesses for better or for good.

Meditation, especially for people who dont know very much about it and think its this very hippy dippy thing, can really be powerful, terrifying even, as it lifts the rug up on your subconscious and the dust comes flying out.

The perfect tools aren't going to help us if we can't face each other and give and receive fearlessly, but more important, to ask without shame.

Life as it should be: all friends, all art, all music, all love, all the time.

The stage show is, in some sense, highly theatrical. It's definitely not just a band in jeans playing rock and roll.

I crave intimacy to the same burning degree that I detest commitment.

Crowdfunding as an idea itself isn't new - bands have been doing it since the dawn of time.

Thank God my best friend's a therapist.

I think it's so important to have a practice, because the consciousness isn't perfection or enlightenment or any of that bullshit. The consciousness is, "Oh, I'm walking down the street and I'm doing nothing."

American culture in particular has instilled in us the bizarre notion that to ask for help amounts to an admission of failure. But some of the most powerful, successful, admired people in the world seem, to me, to have something in common: they ask constantly, creatively, compassionately, and gracefully. And to be sure: when you ask, there's always the possibility of a no on the other side of the request. If we don't allow for that no, we're not actually asking, we're either begging or demanding. But it is the fear of the no that keeps so many of our mouths sewn tightly shut.

The cool thing too, as you get older, you get way better at identifying who's an ally and who isn't. And who has good, positive, "let's make all this sh*t better and let's try to have fun and fix sh*t" people as opposed to "let's sit around and b*tch and berate" people.

The challenge is to just focus on what's actually happening, focus on the people who get it, and focus on the people who are listening.

I think one of the greatest gifts you can give to someone is just access to the possibility of freedom that you don't have to be totally depressed and enslaved by your own environment.

I hate being ignored.

I was just a very dark kid. My family was complicated.

How do we let people pay for music?

I think I've always felt as a band and as a musician and a music business person, I've always felt like an outsider, period.

I don't think of myself as particularly cursed or blessed. I think I got dealt a set of cards, and I'm playing with them, sometimes in heels, sometimes in combat boots.

I get so many ideas for songs, but I'm so seldom disciplined enough to sit down and crank them out.

If you're going to make work and you're going to write and you're going to put yourself out there and perform, you will be belittled, you will be insulted, you will be called a standard collection of names, you will be accused, and you just have to stand there and continue to work and find a way to not let those things poison you.