Dar Williams Quotes

But where do we come up with this notion of a woman in which the less space you take up, the more you're worth?

I've watched towns and cities evolve and become very resilient, and fun, and unique, and prosperous on their own terms. And the secret is bridging. It's when the local church has a fun clothing swap fundraiser with a temple, and then the next year they bring in the mosque.

I think we're coming to a place where we're saying all war is wrong. We might even learn something about the sensationalism we get caught up in with people like Donald Trump.

How I long to fall just a little bit, to dance out of the lines and stray from the light.

There was this moment in 2003 when I was asked to do a fundraiser for someone who was speaking out against the Iraq war when nobody was. I said, "I will do a fundraiser for that guy." And then my friend John Hall, from the band Orleans...He ran for Congress in my district and won. I did a bunch of fundraisers for him.

At this point, I feel like I have roots in a lot of places. I have friends who have put down roots, in Seattle and San Francisco and Portland, and I feel very close to them.

A lot of the songs are pretty unmasked. If you listen to "As Cool As I Am," it's not all that different from what you were hearing from Ani DiFranco and some of the other indie women artists of the time. It was still in that context, still seen as folk music.

The light that stopped the night felt like forgiveness.

A song versus an album is not like a scene versus a play.

It's a collective truth that slavery is wrong, that child labor is wrong, that gross inequality is wrong. God didn't send it.

Milwaukee one of my favorite cites; I think Milwaukee is #1.

There was a lot of distance between the Dar of The Honesty Room and the Dar of Mortal City, so there was no attempt.

I went from having three little jobs that I strung together to being on the road full-time; having some savings that my managers told me to spend. You fly all over the country opening for these other people. You pay a publicist to get some press while you're establishing yourself and you will be solvent in this career forevermore.

Why wouldn't you want to be the envy of your neighbors by being so good and so generous and so smart in how you use the power that you obviously have? That's my patriotism.

The best, most solid place to stand as you look at our present situation is on a foundation of history. The Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the Nazi empire all have things in common.

I really lucked out with that song ["As Cool As I Am"]. Men were becoming much more comfortable with all the different facets and parts of their identity, including their gentler, funnier, sillier, nurturing parts. They started showing up. There was so much exploration of gender at that time. Women were showing up with the range of ways of being female in the world and men were showing up with the range of being male in the world.

The biggest difference would be made if we don't have wars to begin with.

The only word for love is everybody's name.

The summer ends and we wonder who we are And there you go, my friends, with your boxes in your car And today I passed the high school, the river, the maple tree I passed the farms that made it Through the last days of the century And I knew that I was going to learn again Again, in this less hazy light I saw the fields beyond the fields The fields beyond the field

There are a lot of people out there who are exactly half extrovert and half introvert and they love to be extroverts as long as they have enough time to go off and figure it all out.

If you're looking for can-do, earthy-crunchy attitude then you've got to go to Wisconsin.

There's always people who came 600 miles to hear the song you didn't play.

Sometimes life gives us lessons sent in ridiculous packaging.

Every once in a while I check and I say, do I still believe in God? And the answer is absolutely yes. And then I think, I suppose I should go to church now. But after going to so many churches in my life and trying to go with the flow with so many denominations, Eastern and Western, I don't really feel I need to go to church at all.

Therapy was the biggest romance of my life.

And I'll act like I have faith, and like that faith never ends, but I really just have friends.

And the ones that know you so well are the ones that can swallow you whole.

God looks like a guidance counselor, God's got that smile. God says, 'How could this be? That's really odd I guess I'll have to check my records, silly me, you know, I'm only God.'

When we learn about ourselves, we can evolve.

I think music is another language.

"Is it how she moves, or how she looks?" I say it's loneliness suspended to our own like grappling hooks, And as long as she's got noise, she's fine. But I could teach her how I learned to dance when the music's ended.

I think the music was speaking to that opening up of whose voice gets heard and how multidimensional that voice can be.

There's a marketing scheme that tells you that pregnancy and child rearing will make you into a moron, that your kids are only happy when you're buying them stuff. It's hard being a parent, but I laugh a lot and smile a lot and really enjoy it. The ratio of laughter to sadness is higher. There's part of me that wants to broadcast that. Parenting only affirmed what I already cared about, and that's good.

I fear that to fall in love with you is to fall from a great and gruesome height.

Arizona is really cool but I couldn't stay there for too long.

In terms of our democracy, we are sort of shrugging our shoulders and saying, oh dear, Guantánamo, that's so awful, that's so awful, but it's here. The pendulum usually swings from left to right and then right to left, but there are so many people in power who have taken the pendulum and just pinned it to the right that there is a fear that it's never going to swing back.

I started going out with one of my managers and he really grew me up in a lot of ways. He introduced me not just to being a full-time traveler, which I was, but he was also really very interested in history and art and continued to open my eyes up to regional history; less splashy histories. He was interested in historical societies and stuff like that. He introduced me to a way of looking at the way communities form that is the foundation for the book that I've just finished writing that has to do with what I see as effective community-building wherever I've been traveling.

If you're lucky you find something that reflects you, Helps you feel your life, protects you, Cradles you and connects you to everything.

They preach that I should save the world. They pray that I won't do a better job of it.

In the laughing times we know that we are lucky, and in the quiet times we know that we are blessed. And we will not be alone.

Every once in a while I'll say something...I dropped the F-bomb early on in my career. There was this lesbian couple and they looked super-hip. One of them looked at me and shook her head, like "Don't do that." I think she was doing it to say, "It doesn't work." She didn't say anything but it was this cautionary moment. I knew it didn't work. There are just so many other words to choose from.

I'm amazed at the adolescent nature of some of the religious fanatics in our government. And they're full of double standards.

The first concert I saw was Cheryl Wheeler.

I just think the reassurance and the steadiness and the hands-on kindness can make a huge difference.

I remember doing "As Cool As I Am" and Steve Miller, the producer, saying "I really hear a drum loop here. I want to play it for you." When I wrote it, I thought, "This isn't going to sound very folky. I don't think it's going to go with mandolins and banjos." Then he played the loop for me and it sounded right.

Writing 'February' made me realize that breaking form is a way of letting the song be human.

There's the wind And the rain And the mercy of the fallen Who say, "Hey, it's not my place To know what's right" There's the weak And the strong And the many stars that guide us We have some of them inside us

A lot of men were also becoming more attuned and less afraid of women [in the nineties ].