Tori Amos Quotes

I'm a grown woman. I've earned my experiences, my scars.

I know that mess spelled backwards is ssem and I felt much better armed with that information.

The fact that religion plays such a part in how people vote troubles me, troubles me as a minister's daughter. Because I always felt that the separation of church and state was what our forefathers and foremothers really fought for.

For a song cycle to work, you have to feel these things when you hear them and you either have an emotional reaction to it or you don't. The plotline is something that gets woven together in the backstory.

I'm too young for a man, but I'm too old for a boy. So, can't we just pretend, that I'm older than I really am, but then, only little girls pretend.

Not everyone wants you to become your potential, for whatever reason.

There is an energy that you carry when you're nurturing another life where you're protecting first - and once you know that cub is out of the way of the hunter's gun, you can be a little more daring.

Tell me you're crazy, maybe then I'll understand.

The key things are about power and about growing up and realizing as you grow up that there are consequences for the choices you make, especially when you get seduced by power.

Pretty is never beautiful.

I'm the thing that fundamentalist Christians cringe over.

Tori's my legal name. My niece and nephews, they all call me Aunt Ellen, because I went by my middle name years ago, before I turned 18.

The pop world has really opened its doors.

You really do kind of learn a lot about a person when you watch and listen to the songs that mean something to them.

I love the classic crooners, but I got that from my mother - she worked in a record store.

What girls do to each other is beyond description. No chinese torture comes close.

There are 23 bootlegs now. Robert Plant came home with a bootleg video and said 'Tori, you've made it. You're nothing until you've been bootlegged.'

There's a richness to the old works if you look before the 1950s. The chord progressions and the language was more complicated, especially in the jazz and classical world.

Her cover version of Smells Like Teen Spirit is the reason Kurt killed himself.

When you stop putting yourself on the line, and you don't touch your own heart, how do you expect to touch other people?

My father was strict, but he recognised my ability and got a lot of flak from the church for supporting me.

You decide whether you look at your reality or live pretending these feelings don't exist.

I hurt myself today to see if I could feel. I hurt myself, you said to try to make him feel. So I hurt myself again to see if he'd see me. I hurt myself again and no, he never could see me.

I wanted to marry Lucifer. I feel his presence in my music.

The music is the magic carpet that other things take naps on.

Not everybody wants to have the same career. I think what’s difficult is when you have two people that do something very, very similar and they both, say, want the limelight. That’s very tricky.

In my new life, no room for a lost boy.

Those of you who are strong need to be there for those who have lost someone today. We have to be here for each other right now.

From in the shadow she calls. And in the shadow she finds a way, finds a way. And in the shadow she crawls, clutching her faded photograph. My image under her thumb. Yes with a message for my heart. She’s been everybody else’s girl maybe one day she’ll be her own.

Not being afraid to make changes is a valuable tool - knowing you can change back.

Somebody will come backstage and go, 'You saved me.' And I will have to say, 'Stop right there. You saved yourself.'

Being able to hear an opinion. And then how to apply that opinion is something I am learning and working with every day. What can be tricky is how to differentiate a good suggestion that you should apply to your work [from] someone's personal taste at their opinionated best.

I found the secret to life: I'm ok when everything is not ok.

I think you have to know who you are. Get to know the monster that lives in your soul, dive deep into your soul and explore it.

Being able to still make records is a privilege. I don't take it casually.

I do believe that we all are, fundamentally, divided creatures. Emotions split from intellect, spirit from flesh and far too often sexuality is disconnected from what we feel, and are, as total human beings. But how, for example, can anyone have an understanding of the virgin if they don't also have an understanding of the prostitute, the saint and sinner in one body?

I'm trying not to move, it's just your ghost passing through

Parenting is not for everybody. It changes your life. Especially when they're little.

Well, I have a lot of food references in my work.

The music industry is a vicious business. It chews women up and spits them out.

I don't want to sit on the sidelines and not value the gift of being here. Instead of the idea of time ticking away, the grains of sand running out, I try to think of time as giving me another grain of sand, another gift. So time passing is an accumulation, rather than a diminishing.

Robert Plant asked me to marry him, but I said 'no.' I mean, you just don't want to marry someone you've wanted to do it with since you were thirteen, because, well, if he farts, I would, like, die!

Your worst enemies are made when you ignore people. Those boys in America who shot dead classmates recently, didn't do that because they woke up with a positive self image that morning and then felt like slaughtering their friends.

People can travel great distances on a computer, so why can't we travel that way emotionally?

...Her entire life has been devoted to healing the deepest, most invasive unseeable scar that one can ever have.

I want to be an integrated woman.

Is there room in my heart for you to follow your heart?

You know that saying, bad things don't happen to good people? That's a lie.