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You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy.

Joan Baez

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Joan Baez
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: January 9
Activist
Composer
Dancer
Guitarist
Musician
Pacifist
Record Producer
Recording Artist
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Staten Island
New York City
Joan Chandos Báez
Joan Báez
Joan Chandos Baez
Joan C. Baez
Adversity
Despair
Almost
Happy
White
Ends
May
Clearing

More quotes by Joan Baez

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I don't think of myself as a symbol of the sixties, but I do think of myself as a symbol of following through on your beliefs.
Joan Baez
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I have heard more than once, 'Shut up and sing!' and I get it now.
Joan Baez
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I was writing Diamonds and Rust' and it had nothing to do with what it turned out to be. I don't remember what it is, but I think I was writing a song. It was literally interrupted by a phone call, and it just took another curve and it came out to be what it was.
Joan Baez
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I have been true to the principles of nonviolence, developing a stronger and stronger aversion to the ideologies of both the far right and the far left and a deeper sense of rage and sorrow over the suffering they continue to produce all over the world.
Joan Baez
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All of us are survivors, but how many of us transcend survival?
Joan Baez
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If you swing both ways, you really swing. I just figure you double your pleasure.
Joan Baez
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I think the question that nobody wanted to deal with is the question they're posing: did my kid die in vain? Because the answer is too awful.
Joan Baez
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As long as we keep searching, the answers come.
Joan Baez
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The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.
Joan Baez
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Only you and I can help the sun rise each coming morning. If we don't, it may drench itself out in sorrow.
Joan Baez
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The point on nonviolence is to build a floor, a strong new floor, beneath which we can no longer sink.
Joan Baez
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I was addicted to rhythm 'n' blues pretty much directly into folk music. I had my little 45s of mostly black artists. That was as close as I got. I've never listened to heavy rock or stuff that jangles my nerves, because I'm already jangled.
Joan Baez
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If you're gonna sing meaningful songs, you have to be committed to living a life that backs that up.
Joan Baez
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In other words, it is what I do in the world that matters. When I traveled for three months in the Mideast, the places I wanted to go back to were Turkey and the Gaza Strip. It has to do with what Gandhi said: he found God in the eyes of the poor. Those are the places which were so moving that they were just unbearable.
Joan Baez
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I wasn't popular in school, I was Mexican, I was all these inappropriate things. I started playing the ukulele and taking it to school, and I realized people liked listening to it. I would play it to comfort myself at home, and I'd play rhythm and blues songs that had four chords. That's how it started.
Joan Baez
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Somebody else does the rigor and then I listen. I have an assistant, and my manager, and other people who hunt and find and send it to me, and then I just figure out which ones I can do justice to.
Joan Baez
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During the 'ballad' years for me, the politics was latent I was just falling in love with the ballads and my boyfriend. And there was the beauty of the songs.
Joan Baez
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I've been obsessed with stopping people from blowing each other's brains out since I was ten.
Joan Baez
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You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.
Joan Baez
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When I was 16, the guest speaker was King. And I was completely overwhelmed because I had been studying nonviolence, talking about it, reading about it, but here it was happening, here it was people boycotting the buses and people on the streets and taking risks, which I think was the key.
Joan Baez