Ani DiFranco Quotes and Lyrics

"You rhapsodize about beauty,
and my eyes glaze.
Everything that I love is ugly.
I mean really, you would be amazed.
Just do me a favor,
it's the least that you can do,
just don't treat me like I am
something that happened to you."


"I put a cup out on the windowsill
to catch the water as it fell.
Now I got a glass half full of rain
to measure the time between
when you said you'd come
and when you actually came."

"If you see me,
walk by.
You better just let me
walk by.
You better not
bat your pretty eyes.
You better not
stop me to say hi."

"She taught me how to wage a cold war
with quiet charm,
but I just want to walk
through my life unarmed."

"Like how could you do nothing,
and say, 'I'm doing my best.'
How could you take almost everything,
and then come back for the rest?
How could you beg me to stay,
reach out your hands and plead,
and then pack up your eyes and run away
as soon as I agreed?"

"I did not design this game.
I did not name the stakes.
I just happen to like apples,
and I am not afraid of snakes."

“Any tool is a weapon if you hold it right.”

“Taken out of context I must seem so strange.”

“I don't care if they eat me alive, I've got better things to do then survive.”

"You've left me with nothing, but I have worked with less.”

“Some people wear their heart up on their sleeve. I wear mine underneath my right pant leg, strapped to my boot.”

"God forbid you be an ugly girl, of course too pretty is also your doom, because everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room."

“My idea of feminism is self-determination, and it's very open-ended: every woman has the right to become herself, and do whatever she needs to do.”

"I was blessed with a birth and a death, and I guess I just want some say in between."

“Squint your eyes and look closer. I'm not between you and your ambitions."

"I owe my life to the people that I love.”

"Love is a piano dropped from a fourth story window, and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"It seems that different people have an idea of what I am and what I should be. And then there's me."

"People need something or someone to fasten themselves to in order to reassure themselves that they are real."

"I smoke and I drink."

"Just let me go, we have to be able to criticize what we love, to say what we have to say because if you're not trying to make something better, then as far as I can tell, you are just in the way."

"Imagine you're a girl,
just trying to finally come clean,
knowing full well they'd prefer you
were dirty and smiling."


"He was a handsome musician,
but he had an ugly scar.
You could not see it on him,
but you could hear it when he played guitar."


"I am writing graffiti on your body.
I am drawing the story of how hard we tried.
I am watching your chest rise and fall
like the tides of my life,
and the rest of it all.
And your bones have been my bedframe,
and your flesh has been my pillow.
I am waiting for sleep
to offer up the deep
with both hands."

"He didn't understand me, and
I don't know why I didn't go.
He didn't understand me, and
he had every chance to know."

"You were fresh off the boat
from Virginia,
I had a year of NYC
under my belt.
We met in a dream.
We were both 19.
I remember where we were standing,
I remember how it felt."

"I can jump ship and swim--
that the ocean will hold me,
that there's got to be more
than this boat I'm in."

"I'd rather be able to face myself in the bathroom mirror than be rich and famous."

“Self-preservation is a full-time occupation."