"I've never had a very closely connected family. My parents split up when I was young and I was living with my mom for a little while, then I was kind of just on my own really young. It wasn't some kind of global tragedy, it was just never really a very close-knit family. So there was support in the sense that they didn't stand in my way."

"Pop stardom is not very compelling. I'm much more interested in a relationship between performer and audience that is of equals. I came up through folk music, and there's no pomp and circumstance to the performance. There's no, like, 'I'll be the rock star, you be the adulating fan.'"

"I've been trying to learn how to not be so conflicted about things like my own anger. I've always had a place in my music for my anger as a way of compensating for not having a mechanism to express it in my everyday life. So I've been trying to be more true to myself, and that helps me to chill out a little bit. But politically, uh-uh. No."

"A lot of women these days, a lot of young women don't want to call themselves feminists. You have this cheap, hideous 'girl power' sort of fad, which I think is pretty benign at best, but at worst, I think it's a way of taking the politics out of feminism and making it some kind of fashion."

"Plants and minerals are bound to predestination. The faithful is only bound to the Divine orders."

"God has given us two hands - one to receive with and the other to give with. We are not cisterns made for hoarding; we are channels made for sharing."

"In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it."

"It is a essential truth that do not measure life by the breaths you take, but by the moments that stir your soul — an essential principle for the reflective life."