Eunice Kathleen Waymon Quotes
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Life is short. People are not easy to know. They're not easy to know, so if you don't tell them how you feel, you're not going to get anywhere, I feel.
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My job is not done. I address my songs now to the third world. I am popular all over Asia and Africa and the Middle East, not to speak of South Africa, where I'm trying to go to see Nelson Mandela.
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I think if I were over there in America, protest music would be more important. But I'm not going.
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Birds flying high you know how I feel Sun in the sky you know how I feel Breeze driftin' on by you know how I feel And this old world is a new world And a bold world For me And I'm feeling good I'm feeling good
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Music has been a burden and a joy for as long as I can remember.
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I love to travel to hear different kinds of music.
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That is why we fly from the inner void, since God might steal into it. It is not the pursuit of pleasure and the aversion for effort which causes sin, but fear of God. We know that we cannot see him face to face without dying, and we do not want to die.
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Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.
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If I get an idea I put it on tape and somebody else writes it out.
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There's no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.
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I don't like drug addicts and she sounds like a cat.
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It is difficult to retain your standards with the pressure of trying to make money, which always has its rules...It's hard to walk the tightrope of doing what you think is your best and making money at it.
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I can't stand loud guitars that make me deaf.
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How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it.
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From the beginning, it has been a no-no for a black man to touch a white woman.
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Jazz is not just music, it's a way of life, it's a way of being, a way of thinking. . . . the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things - all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.
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It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution - real girl's talk.
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I can read and arrange, but I can't write.
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As far as piano players are concerned, Oscar Peterson is my very favorite. I also like McCoy Tyner. I think that the big jazz stars, both now and in the past...how shall I say it? These guys are as great as Bach, Beethoven; all of them. People don't know it yet. If jazz survives and is put on a pedestal as an art form, the same as classical music has been through the years, a hundred years from now the kids will know who they were, with that kind of respect.
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Everything that happened to me as a child involved music. It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.
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Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
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When a child is gifted, people try to help that child.
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There are all kinds of things that can be done. You can change rhythms, you can change chords, you can change whole concepts. But it will only work, on a record or in a performance, if you can make the people buy it.
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We have ordered things so long in a certain way, we are numb. Nobody dares question it. This is what is wrong, symbolically, with America.