72 Quotes by Natalie Merchant

The research phase was really fascinating - I'm not a closeted nerd, I'm an out-of-the-closet nerd.

My mother was a single working mother; she started having children very young. There was a tension inside her about who she wanted to be and what she wanted to do and how she couldn't achieve the things she wanted to.

It's funny, I remember doing the Johnny Carson show, and, uh, I couldn't afford my rent.

I wish I had appreciated my youth - I should have worn tighter clothing when I could have!

I'm on this search trying to figure out exactly who I am and what I have to say to people.

I think of myself as a musician and not a celebrity. Celebrity status is something you have to deliberately pursue - I couldn't imagine myself seeking that.

I've found out how overwhelming the media is and the way it drills things into your head, it's almost like a mind control. If I could control prople's minds, I'd like to put something useful in.

My sister works in an inner-city school in Greenville, South Carolina, and she brought many of her at-risk kids to our show yesterday to the sound-check. It was amazing how these kids opened up with music. Music teaches so much about focus and concentration and group dynamics and appreciation for subtlety and beauty. And that's being taken away from schools.

That kind of violence is dangerous to me, to be beamed out via satellite to the rest of the country. Since I don't watch television very much, when I do check in, I'm horrified. But I don't think it took a massacre in a high school in America for me to see that there's too much violence or that children aren't being taught to use their own judgment when they watch television.