Joan Baez Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

To love means you also trust.

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.

You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As long as we keep searching, the answers come.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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

It sounds corny, but it's absolutely true: A song chooses me. I don't go looking for a certain kind of lyric. It kind of develops its own little arc and I'll just see what happens.

Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full blown storm where everything changes. The sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animals skitter in the mud and everything gets dark and goes completely wild. But it is really God - playing music in his favourite cathedral in heaven - shattering stained glass - playing a gigantic organ - thundering on the keys - perfect harmony - perfect joy.

Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times.

The longer you practice nonviolence and the meditative qualities of it that you will need, the more likely you are to do something intelligent in any situation.

I'm lucky to have met so many people who have been involved in peace and who have been peace prize winners.

The search is in the doing.

I think music has the power to transform people, and in doing so, it has the power to transform situations - some large and some small.

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.

God must have something to do with joy ... and with sadness.

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

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.

That was sheer luck that it [being immersed into folk scene] happened when my voice began to develop. I don't know exactly what would have happened if I hadn't been alive and well and really lively in the Cambridge scene. But (the folk scene) was, and I fell into it absolutely naturally in the little coffee shops, and pretty soon it was Newport and then it was an overwhelming response internationally, actually.

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."

I am so disconnected from the world of rock 'n' roll. I was always peripheral, partly because of the drug culture. I was not involved in that.

Peace might sell, but who's buying?

I have heard more than once, 'Shut up and sing!' and I get it now.

The only thing that's been a worse flop than the organization of nonviolence has been the organization of violence.

"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.

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.

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

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

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

Action is the antidote to despair.

Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A fullblown storm where everything changes.

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

I've been obsessed with stopping people from blowing each other's brains out since I was ten.

I was trying to disturb the war.

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.

To sing is to praise God and the daffodils, and to praise God is to thank Him, in every note within my small range, and every color in the tones of my voice, with every look into the eyes of my audience, to thank Him. Thank you, God, for letting me be born, for giving me eyes to see the daffodils lean in the wind, all my brothers, all my sisters, for giving me ears to hear crying, legs to come running, hands to smooth damp hair, a voice to laugh with and to sing with...to sing to you and the daffodils.

Some people don't even notice. "Oh, you sound exactly like you did!" And I say, "OK, if that's what you want to believe, that's fine."

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.