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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I love to travel to hear different kinds of music.
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If I get an idea I put it on tape and somebody else writes it out.
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Music has been a burden and a joy for as long as I can remember.
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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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I can't stand loud guitars that make me deaf.
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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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There's no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.
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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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Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.
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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 don't like drug addicts and she sounds like a cat.
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It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution - real girl's talk.
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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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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 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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I'm sorry that I did not become the world's first black classic pianist. I think I would have been happier.
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I can read and arrange, but I can't write.
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To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.
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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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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.