The light that stopped the night felt like forgiveness.

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.

...we're all in a soup of trying to live by words, and trying to live by poetry. It's both humbling, and really flattering to know that my words are part of all that.

There was one tour where I thought, "If I can't get this feeling back of being excited to be on the stage, then I will quit." Because I have friends who have dialed it in and I watch their concerts and shake my head. I'm sure the audience can tell, too.

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.

The kind of organic wave, the way that waves move, and I'm not just talking about feminism, the way that a social movement might rise like a wave. It's harder to build any kind of wave now. Things are important to you and then they recede within a day. That's the only thing that keeps me from believing that there's going to be any one organic big wave; although the Americana (music) thing has been happening for a while.

The first concert I saw was Cheryl Wheeler.