Everything that happened to me as a child involved music. It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.
NINA SIMONEI had heard blues and jazz all my life but I was never aware that it was associated with nightclubs and drinking.
More Nina Simone Quotes
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Music is an art and art has its own rules.
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Since I was three I’ve been playing the piano. I’ve been onstage.
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Through music you can become sad, joyful, loving, you can learn. You can learn mathematics, touch, pacing Oh my God! Ooh Wow You can see colors through music. Anything!
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I was always a politician from the day the civil rights people chose me as their protest singer.
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I had heard blues and jazz all my life but I was never aware that it was associated with nightclubs and drinking.
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How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it.
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To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that’s not what I play. I play black classical music.
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You have to learn to get up from the table when love is not being served.
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I don’t like rap music at all. I don’t think it’s music. It’s just a beat and rapping.
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I made wine from the lilac tree/Put my heart in its recipe/It makes me see what I want to see/And be what I want to be.
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To be young, gifted and black!
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It doesn’t matter to me what is going on today because my music encompasses every kind of mood that exists in human beings. That’s my stick.
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I know I’m different, but I don’t think about it.
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Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things – all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.
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I feel more alive now than I ever have in my life. I have a chance to live, as I’ve dreamed.
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Many times I feel different like a different person.
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We have ordered things so long in a certain way, we are numb. Nobody dares question it. This is what is wrong, symbolically, with America.
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My love is like the wind and wild is the wind. Give me more than one caress, satisfy my hungriness. Let the wind blow through your heart for wild is the wind.
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Life is short. People are not easy to know. They’re not easy to know, so if you don’t tell them how you feel, you’re not going to get anywhere, I feel.
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That’s a very high goal to have, study eight hours a day to be a concert pianist.
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You’ve got to learn to leave the table When love’s no longer being served”.
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The worst thing about that kind of prejudice is that while you feel hurt and angry and all the rest of it, it feeds you self-doubt. You start thinking, perhaps I am not good enough.
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Every day has its emotional difficulties. I miss my mother whether I’m singing her music or not.
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Greed has driven the world crazy. And I think I’m lucky that I have a place over here that I can call home.
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Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking.
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From the beginning, it has been a no-no for a black man to touch a white woman.
NINA SIMONE