We are taught to view pain as an enemy, not a teacher. But pain is the right hand of growth and transformation. Pain is in the history of all human wisdom.

People who are just starting out are always sort of coming to me for advice as the example of "independent girl," and lots of people ask, well, how did you get the booking agent or the national distribution or the tours? And I look at them like, "Good lord! Relax!" I mean, how I did it was to not care about it and to not even think about it for years and years. All I thought about was getting the next little gig in the little bar, and I get this sense that people want me to give them the secret formula or the magic trick to make it all happen.

Squint your eyes and look closer I'm not between you and your ambition I am a poster girl with no poster I am thirty-two flavors and then some And I'm beyond your peripheral vision So you might want to turn your head Cause someday you might find you're starving and eating all of the words you said.

Life is a sleazy stranger, who looks vaguely familiar; flirting with a bimbo named disaster at the end of the bar.

If you want to challenge the system, don't go to bed with it.

I'm recording our history now on the bedroom wall, and when we leave the landlord will come and paint over it all.

How come I can pick my ears but not my nose?