DAILY TORI AMOS QUOTES AND LYRICS
(AND OTHER TORIPHILE GOODIES)
(AND OTHER TORIPHILE GOODIES)
Performing is the best high there is and I hardly do drugs any more. I’ve experimented like most people - a bit of acid here, a bit of ecstasy there - but there is nothing like when you plug in on stage. I don’t know what it does but it feels like having an affair with 5,000 people. Or like 1983 Margaux is flowing through my veins. That’s my scene these days. I’m really into good wine. And I have to look after my health. It’s a bit unglamorous crawling to the bathroom after some of those drugs.
-- Tori Amos, The Times - September 21, 1999
I don’t have any illusion about what my responsibility is. I understand that when you write emotional work, it can bring things up, and I genuinely have time for people when they are opening that heart-space.
-- Tori Amos, Spin - November 1999
Precious Things is a song that came to me when I was living behind a church. And I was about 24 years old. I had a roommate that listened to really raucous music and it started to take me into flashbacks of my grandmother. And she used to put me in a corner and she would read me something, I think from Leviticus, I can’t remember. But um, she was convinced that I was gonna give my soul to God and my body to a man that I would marry. Um, but at five years old I knew that we were enemies, so in my mind I was always trying to find ways to get away from this creature. So I thought of things and my mother thought I was a demon for thinking them. But I think she would smile out of the corner, because I think she felt the same way. So behind this church with this music going on and on in my head. I started to really think that maybe just one day, I could run faster.
--Tori Amos, VH1 Storytellers - 1999
I guess anyone can be annoying. I know that I annoy people sometimes, particularly my friend Beenie. When I won’t let her eat sugar. Once in a while, of course there’s gonna be someone that pushes something too far. But… I can also find that at a family Christmas dinner. So, a sense of humor is really important. You can’t take things too personally. I don’t think people really mean to be a pain. I know I don’t mean to be one when I’m being one.
--Tori Amos, America Online Chat - Jan 20 1999
I remember being 5 years old and having these little shoes with an enclosed toe with an opening where I could insert different colors. That was the beginning of an obsession.
--Tori Amos, Steve Madden Sponsored AOL Chat - Oct 19 1999
The energy that I get playing live propels me into a deep well, inside somewhere that I probably couldn’t get to with out the shows…
-- Tori Amos, AOL chat - January 20, 1999
Usually I have a blood-line going for a song, so there are certain marriages of words that happen. Sometimes I try and become the words, so I’ll take on the properties and characteristics of a squeeze-boy say. Am I still a woman as a squeeze-box? Obviously. With something like Suede, which is about seduction, I picture jets revving and I was walking round the studio with a physics encyclopedia. The guy character in the song thinks the girl character is really evil, yet he’s there to be seduced. Sometimes people act quick to see my evil twin, but they don’t detect their own
-- Tori Amos, Mojo magazine (UK) - November 1999
I was totally freaked by Led Zeppelin. I wasn’t allowed to have posters on the wall, because we didn’t own the house and the walls had to stay clean. But all over those album covers were my sticky fingers
-- Tori Amos, Aloha - November 1999
There has to be a balance… I don’t see dark as evil and light as good. I see it as the unconscious, things hidden that you have to see. … There is a line in Zero Point, where I sing, “Take off, lift off, creaming Jesus still.” To me, if you are really in the balanced state, you are creaming the divine.
-- Tori Amos, Pulse - November 1999
I wish she had been on Pele, cause I think it would have been kinda cool for a volcano to say ‘This is cooling faster than I can’
--– Tori Amos; Boston FNX AIDS benefit, 12/03/99
There’s no redeeming justice behind being a cunt. Cunts are usually mad at the world… I went to a store, she agreed to work at the store for this money, and she’s angry about it. Well, it’s not my fault that you took the gig. Go give blow-jobs for a hundred and twenty-five quid. You have that option. A lot of cunts are projecting outward.
-- Tori Amos, Boyz (UK) - November 6, 1999
It’s a Dutch thing. I love that, their idea of not a drama queen but a poofter. But I love the word “riot” being with it, because in a strange way it’s a joke. But at the same time it’s not, because of the unleashing of the gay community. Sometimes it really is a sexual riot, a frenzy. It’s a real male frenzy, that whole song. But the idea of the unbelievable judgment that men have against men who desire to be with other men… But women wanting to be with women is quite yummy to anybody. If you think about it, the idea of men who love watching women being together, there’s an erotica. That’s “on the birth of the search/white trash, my native son”. I’m singing “Riot Poof” from the concept of the mother—the all-inclusive mother, having borne men who want to be with men, having borne men who want to “break the terror of the urban spell,” who want to kill men who want to be with other men. Because Venus, that’s the mother mode. She’s singing it from her point of view: “The sun is warming, my man is moistening.
-- Tori Amos (speaking of Riot Poof, All Music Zine, October 1999)
This is a collection of Tori Amos quotes. If you're a fellow EWF please feel free to submit some of your favorite quotes.
