Quotes by Joni Mitchell

“you dont know what you got till its gone”

“Will you take me as I am? Strung out on another man...California, I'm comin' home.”

“We are stardustBillion-year old carbonAnd we've got to get ourselves back to the garden”

“In search of love and music my whole life has beenIlluminationCorruptionAnd diving, diving, diving, diving down To pick up on every shiny thing”

“We love our lovin'....but not like we love our freedom.”

“I've looked at life from both sides now From up and down and still somehowIt's life's illusions I recallI really don't know life at all”

“The thing that gave me the most pain in life, psychologically, and it gave me tremendous pain psychologically, is man's disrespect for nature.”

“No one likes to have less than they had before. That's the nature of the human animal.”

“I loved Debussy, Stravinsky, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, anything with romantic melodies, especially the nocturnes. Nietzsche was a hero, especially with 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra.' He gets a bad rap; he's ...”

“I see music as fluid architecture.”

“You have this mounting aggressive ignorance with the rabbit's foot of their particular religion. You don't really have any kind of spiritual law, just a kind of a rabid mental illness. The songs ar...”

“Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell.”

“It's in my stars to invent; I was born on Madame Curie's birthday. I have this need for originals, for innovation. That's why I like Charlie Parker.”

“I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.”

“Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone.”

“Once I got the open tunings for some reason, I began to get the harmonic sophistication that I heard that my musical fountain inside was excited by. [...] Once I got some interesting chords to play...”

“You're twiddling and you find the tuning. Now the left hand has to learn where the chords are, because it's a whole new ballpark, right? So you're groping around, looking for where the chords are, ...”

“That's one thing that's always, like, uh, the major difference between the performing arts to me, and being a painter, you know. Like, a painter does a painting, and he does a painting — and that's...”

“I need to explore and discover and so that has given me, really, to some what seems like courage, but really it's just in my stars, there's nothing I can do about it . . . . I guess I'll just take ...”

“I don't like being too looked up at or too looked down on. I prefer meeting in the middle to being worshipped or spat out.”