Janis Ian Quotes
I started 'Society's Child' on a bus in East Orange as I was going home from school. I saw a black and white couple sitting there and started thinking about it.
Quotes to Explore
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Music was a way of rebelling against the whole rah-rah high school thing.
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My grandfather started a school for the underprivileged in Chandigarh, and that is why we moved from Himachal to Chandigarh. It was a small school, where even I would teach while in school.
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I get carded for soda, you know, when I go to the supermarket. I mean, they card me for everything. You know, I can't even get through a hand of black jack without getting carded, like, five times.
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Cleanliness is a good thing, which the society should embrace. But it has nothing to do with Modi, nor can he implement it.
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I've been influenced by some of the greatest designers. Charles Eames. And Bruno Munari in the '50s in Italy - when they had to retool the industry of war into an industry to help society. In a way, I'm influenced by designers that were there at a radical time of change.
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I've never really lived a conventional life, so I think it's quite foolish for me or anyone else to start thinking that I am going to start making conventional choices.
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Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be 'constitutional' does not make it so.
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My dad was a huge big band and jazz fan, and we both sort of enjoyed be-bop, but man, it required so much skill to play it. And then there was cool jazz, the era that Miles, Coltrane, and Ornette ushered in, and that found a home in me. It turns out that that music was just really where I breathed.
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I respond very well to well-written material and women who have had an effect on society, something tragic or monumental has happened to them.
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You can't reorder any society from outside. You can help from within.
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We had to go all through the night thinking that our baby was dead. When God showed him to us, he wasn't dead, he was sucking his thumb. God had him safe and sound. He is a miracle. He is so healthy, so perfect, and God has really, really blessed us.
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The right to marry is vital in society. It's a right that's older than the Bill of Rights because it goes back to the common law.
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Over my career, I've reinvented myself numerous times. I covered the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA. I wrote about labor wars, trade wars and real wars. I chronicled a nuclear plant meltdown and the defeat of Communism. I co-founded a couple of media businesses.
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In school I was in the dark room all the time, and I've always collected stray photographs; there's a great deal of memory in them.
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For centuries, building materials were free. You want to build a house, you cut down some trees. But we haven't been thinking about the cost to the planet.
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At school, I got teased because I was so thin and awkward-looking.
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Sometimes you go into a film and you have no time to prepare and have to compress the details into a few days and then rely on the instinct and what happens when you're in a scene with other actors and that chemistry or not.
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I believe black characters in fiction are still revolutionary, given our long history of erasure.
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I wasn't that bothered with school; I was too mad into horses. But I liked reading and was good enough at English and always liked music.
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Black people have always been more than our pain. The joy is so much a part of how we have survived and thrived.
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I think there might even come a time when I would read Virgil again. Ovid's Metamorphoses, perhaps, not because the music goes round and round and never comes out, but because it's an extraordinary picture of ceaseless change that never comes to an end.
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The biggest accomplishment, in racial terms, for Barack Obama was being elected. He had to overcome his blackness to be elected. He climbed the Mt. Everest of American politics, becoming an historic first.
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One must remember that in the '70s, Democrats still grasping for Camelot were desperately pinning their hopes on Teddy while Republicans were doing everything they could politically to turn him into a punch line post-Chappaquiddick. And the idea of Ted Kennedy - rather than the actual man - dominated his political legacy through the early '90s.
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I started 'Society's Child' on a bus in East Orange as I was going home from school. I saw a black and white couple sitting there and started thinking about it.
