This is a list of my favorite non-lyrical Tori Amos quotes. (soon to be somewhat seperated by topic)

• "We're taught which sides of our personalities are acceptable and which aren't. The magical side, the naive side, the side that believes in possibilities other than you grow up, take a job, form a place in society and then go to heaven, except for mean old Hitler, no one wants to talk about that."

• "I don't know what a shrink would call me. I don't want to know."

• "I don't hate men. I give them equal time in my hate. It's acts of people I hate. Whether they be men or women, it's their behavior that I hate."

• "Usually they sprinkle a few drops of water on your head; in my case they held my head under for thirteen fucking years."

• "You can never believe what you're up to when you're up to it of course."

• "I do sound like the little mermaid on acid."

• "For all these years, I felt like all these different people at a dinner party. When you've got the virgin and the whore sitting next to each other at dinner, they're likely to judge each other harshly."

• "I think you're always striving for wholeness. I don't think you can put a time limit to it; it's really always another fragment coming your way as long as you're alive until you leave the planet."

• "Say we didn't have bodies and blood and guts, but just released these little light energies like colors, then we could just merge. That's what making love is all about."

• "The most important thing to me as a songwriter is the breath. The most important thing I could ever say to somebody is, 'Sometimes I just breathe you in."

• "I take that stage and that piano and demon girls come out."

• "I feel if you talk about the self it's like a microcosm of wider issues.... That's how I find out what I'm made of."

• "To me the songs already exist. I'm just an interpreter for them."

• "There are only ten ideas..., what makes the difference is how you spice them."

• "In twenty years we're gonna wake up in a tidal wave of crap."

• "Sometimes you see how people beat their children up in a mall, and there is no sense in it; why some kids are taken from the loving parents and why children are given to those who are treating them badly. That all is a part of the big mystery of life."

• "People are afraid of what they might find if they try to analyze themselves too much, but you have to crawl into the wound to discover what your fears are. Once the bleeding starts, the cleansing can begin."

• "A lot of times, the animal that bit you, you have to go and commune with that animal to release the poison, to release that bite, to understand the infection that it causes."

• "You know how women always say men aren't emotionally available. Well, a lot of women aren't emotionally available. It's like, if you're vulnerable, we say, 'Look, we need you to be sensitive.' So you become sensitive, and yet we go, 'You've got no fuckin' backbone.' and we kick you in the face and run off with a ski trainer."

• "You see, I didn't get married because I didn't have anything to do. I really looked at this man and thought 'this person is incredibly unique and I don't want to be with anybody else."

• "Some of the most wonderful people are the ones who don't fit into boxes."

• "Forgiveness is the most important thing about friendship."

• "`Orchards are simple.' a peach tree says. `Some of me will be juicy and some of me will be dry. I'm not growing for you, I'm growing because that's what I do.' You always hear people complaining about how dry their peach is, and the peach says `It's not my fault you don't know the proper usage of dry peaches.'"

• "There comes a time when you want to roast marshmallows over your own fire."

• "Healing takes courage, and we all have courage, even if we have to dig a little to find it."

• "I'd be quite happy, as an artist, if I knew that a verse, even a line in one of my songs could do for people what 'Thelma and Louise' did for me, liberate them in some way, particularly from a fear of the darker side of their own nature."

• "I don't know anybody who's willing to cut God up a cantaloupe and say, 'Hey, sit down, put your feet up, you need some advice.' You have to have a bit of confidence to do that. You have to stop a minute and say 'I'm not buying this trip that humans aren't worthy of talking to the gods.'"

• "Healing for me is being able to sit next to the butcher and say, 'Yes, I'm sitting next to the butcher now,' instead of saying 'There is no butcher.' Well, there definitely is one!"

• "Men have periods too, they just don't bleed..."

• "When musicians challenge themselves, they therefore challenge their audience, and therfore the whole market gets challenged. When you do that, you have a lot of challenging music out there. Then the medium rises to another level."

• "I've heard a popular movie director scoff at the idea of the 'inner child'. This is nothing to scoff at. We are made of many different fragments. If these fragments aren't dealt with, we'll all end up in a looney bin."

• "I realized that what was most important to me was following my own path, and not the one laid down for me by others."

• "Give the kids tools, so they can go build their own houses; not the blueprint of what the houses should be."

• "I really respect anybody who stands by their truth."

• "Whether mankind or womankind has created what god has become, the point is it's a very strong force that has divided us within ourselves. I mean religion has divided the whole planet."

• "Some of the most wonderful people are the ones who don't fit into boxes."

• "What is an angel but a ghost in drag?"

• "You don't have to justify everything. Being pissed off is just absolutely okay."

• "When all young people would start listening to their own voice instead of saying what adults say or whatever MTV dicatates, this would be a whole different planet."

• "My work doesn't relate to the masses. My work is really for the elite. And when I say elite, I mean the mental elite... if you don't think, and you have no wit, and you have so many hangups that you can't look beyond your cup of coffee, then you're never going to understand what I'm really saying. Because you know what? You're going to shut down and close off before you hear me. If I'm threatening you, you're going to see it the way you need to see it so you can dismiss me."

• "I do like to talk about things that nobody wants to hear at the dinner table."

• "To me happiness, true happiness is when you can really dance with sad."