Laura marling quotes

I made an important decision, which was to pursue happiness. Rather than accept unhappiness. That's why I'm here, and it's great. I'm in a very good place in my life.

I do so hate to be forced to be anything than other than what I am.

People think I look odd onstage. But the way I deal with being incredibly nervous is by concentrating really hard.

I don't have much to complain about in life, because I've lived a very privileged existence and continue to. I just think, What if I didn't have that confidence or strength of character, and I was left with certain perceptions of what a woman's place is in the world?

I sound awful saying it but I think it can be like that. I see a lot of people in unstimulating relationships. And not just boyfriend-girlfriend relationships. They find themselves in stagnant friendships. If people were a little less scared [of ending things] they'd get more out of life… You meet the right person at the right time and they fulfil a certain something in your life. You fulfil something in theirs. But there's a time limit to that. Unless you choose to be bloody good company for the rest of your life, do you know what I mean?

No one starts playing my kind of music to make a fortune. But I do want to keep doing what I do and I do want to continue selling records. And I would, eventually, quite like some money.

I can't give up that quick My life is a candle and a wick You can put it out, but you can't break it down In the end we are waiting to be lit

I'm reluctantly interested in love and helplessly interested in logic and yet they're so conflicting. And they're both necessary for a happy balance, a happy existence... I think.

Why fear death? Be scared of living.

There's a house across the river, but alas, I cannot swim I'll live my life regretting that I never jumped in

I need some isolation, it's necessary to me, that's just who I am. I need to be left alone.

I don't need to sell tons of records, but I want longevity. I want to make music for the rest of my life.

Now that I'm feeling the responsibilities of adulthood, the choices we make become an incredible weight.

I've got my laptop, but it troubles me in many ways. I don't have Twitter or Facebook or anything like that. It ruins a romantic idea, which might just be an illusion, a sense of depth or continuity. I know there are lots of positives in the evolution of technology, but I also think it will be responsible for the end of a unique character, of a specific kind of geographical culture. The world is getting so small, and mass production is getting so big. Everything is in danger of becoming the same.

I've always loved books by the Bronte sisters. I love Jane Austen, too. I'm more influenced by people like her than by pop culture.

When a song wants to be written, it will be written.

I think I'll feel out of place wherever I go on earth, forever. But that's fine. I have to make my peace with that.

Living in L.A., I was completely lost - and I enjoyed it.

I get up, go and get a coffee, and go do the crossword - I'm loyal to one particular paper, the 'Guardian' - and that's my idea of a perfect morning.

I definitely tell things at arm's length but that is conscious. No part of me wants everybody to know what's going on.

A friend is a friend forever And a good one will never leave, never

I speak because I can to anyone I trust enough to listen.

I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.

Women are presented with a very narrow aspect of the female narrative. And now we live in a culture and a time where it gets to us very quickly and very young. So how do you maintain in a child that sense of unique identity before they get thrown all that is projected on them?

I'm the first to admit that I'm still pretty young.

I think everybody who relates to music is kind of isolated. It's lonely. Everyone who uses the creative side of their brain is that much removed from reality. They are looking for answers wherever they can find them.

Age is relative. Experience is relative. And I think often intensity is confused with maturity.

Take me somewhere I can grow Give me something let me go Tell me something I don't know

I read a lot by female psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, who wrote prominent biographies of Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud because she studied with all of them. She had this unbelievable insight into contemporary psychoanalysis. What is so interesting is that she wrote her life, and she knew that her life would be about these men, and it didn't stop her from leading an incredibly successful academic career. But her strange self-awareness that she was going to bookmark these men's lives is really interesting to me.

There's huge amounts of nonsense that goes with everything surrounding music and art. All the things you have to do promote yourself - there's huge amounts of nonsense.

I am quite competitive. In stupid things like card games.

But if i sit here and weep I'll be blown over by the slightest of breeze

I like living in the city, but I like being able to get out of it as and when I like.

I'd prefer to be good, but I'm not always. I struggle.

I feel increasingly like age is very irrelevant. Quite often, cynicism is confused with wisdom, and my scorn is confused with a knowing, which I don't have.

I'm not religious, I'm not romantic and I live purely by logic. I make every decision by logic and sometimes that leads me to the right and sometimes to the wrong decision.

I'm a lot more observational than personal in my writing. My writing is mostly a lot of questions without answers.

My songs are not pretty. They're what I call optimistic realism.

I'd like to make music for as long as I can; it feels like something I need to do.

I'm a bit of a magpie: whatever I see or hear or read feeds into the songs.

I was an incredibly misanthrope. I couldn't relate to people my age, and I'm not sure why, as I wasn't particularly smart or interesting

I'm incredibly neurotic and a control freak. I like the thought that if there's going to be anyone to blame it's going to be me.

All my songs come from me because I only seem able to write about myself and my experiences.

In my experience, the psychological aspect of femininity tends to be more receptive and apathetic and delicate. I think that because the feminine is a bit quieter, we live in a masculine-dominated society. It is the front-forward force that runs the world. And that's not the fault of men by any means, that's just the way the world works.

Rilke has a very bizarre relationship to women because his mother had an older child, a girl who died when she was a baby. So when Rilke was born she named him Sophie and dressed him as a girl until he was 7. And psychologically, the repercussions of that made him the genius that he is. By the time he was 35, he was continuously falling in love with older women, mother figures, spiritual mothers.

I feel sometimes that I'm in a constant state of being lost in translation, and I guess that why I write songs.

Oh! To not need cognitive justification for every single thing. Wouldn't that be a life?

The female psyche is inherently self-sufficient, because female sexuality is inherently self-sufficient. I think women are maybe more comfortable, or women are able to find physical beauty in each other that doesn't terrify them.

I find it dull when my heart meets my mind

I would never sit and write a song in front of anyone, because you're so vulnerable. I don't know at what point in the process that it becomes acceptable to pass them on. When a song wants to be written, it will be written. When it does come, I will very rarely go back and edit lyrics. I'm quite a rational human being, and the only part of my life that I can't rationalise, or can't make sense of, is how a song gets written or why.

I feel like I'm creeping closer to finding the situation that triggers songwriting, which is obviously an extreme of an emotion.

If I don't have an outlet in which to express myself...throug h songwriting or other mediums...I get a bit jittery.

It’s hard to accept yourself as someone you don’t desire / As someone you don’t want to be.

Basically what Salomé did with Rilke as a mentor was direct him toward the Russian Orthodox Church, so he could project his love of the divine feminine onto the Virgin Mary. She wanted him to stop the cycle of being disappointed by the ultimate humanity of women. She was like, "You don't want me, you want the Virgin Mary." It's kind of a mystical concept! She also changed Freud's opinion, a little bit too late, about the female psyche, which he had so wrong. If it had been better publicized, it would have changed Western society's perception of the female psyche, too.

I think your most intimate thoughts are only honest when they're in your head.

I thought ‘I wonder what will happen if I try and root myself somewhere?‘ Look back over the past eight years.

The romanticised life, where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from, is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence.

I love the way you can fall in love with a piece of literature; how words alone can get your heart doing that.

Lover please do not fall to your knees it's not like I believe in everlasting love

I know how ridiculous this sounds because of the job I do but I don't believe in romanticism and make-believe.

People don't appreciate music any more. They don't adore it. They don't buy vinyl and just love it. They love their laptops like their best friend, but they don't love a record for its sound quality and its artwork.

I remember my father playing me Same Situation when I was a nipper, and saying how nobody since has done melodies as well as Joni Mitchell. I concur. The thing that most affected me was just her resonance, and that is something she must have been born with.

My reaction to everything in life is when it gets a bit complicated to water it down and make it simple again.

Womanhood is something you don't consider until it hits you.

One woman I interviewed, Amanda Ghost, said, "Let's not bullshit, there are no women at the top of the music business, and that is a serious problem." And I said, "Yes!" And I didn't shy away from saying that. But I still don't want to be in the firing line. I'm not clever or witty or brave enough to get into the political nitty-gritty with it.

It took a lot of time and practice for me to realise that there's no point trying to be something you're not.