Top 100 Linda Ronstadt Quotes
#1. You don't want people who have never had to deal with adversity - you want people who have been able to deal successfully with adversity. That's what adds to society. Those are going to be the hardest-working, best people.
Linda Ronstadt
#2. My feeling is that the beaches should belong to everybody. Nobody should be able to build anything. It causes erosion. It's a bad thing altogether.
Linda Ronstadt
#3. I had tried marijuana several times, but in the words of my friend and longtime assistant Janet Stark, When I smoke pot, it makes me want to hide under the bed with a box of graham crackers and not share.
Linda Ronstadt
#4. I admire people's marriages, and I think it's a wonderful thing to have, but I don't think it's the only way to live. I think there are many ways to live and many ways to establish intimate support in your life that can be from family or friends or great roommates that you like.
Linda Ronstadt
#5. When the night wind starts to sing a lonesome lullaby, it helps to think we're sleeping underneath the same big sky.
Linda Ronstadt
#6. I'll occasionally go and do an honor like the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund because it raises money for a very worthy organization.
Linda Ronstadt
#8. Parkinson's is very hard to diagnose. So when I finally went to a neurologist, and he said, 'Oh, you have Parkinson's disease,' I was completely shocked.
Linda Ronstadt
#9. I think if the United States gave anything to culture at large in the 20th century, the most important contribution made was the popular song.
Linda Ronstadt
#11. If you don't have story to tell the public at large - you have to be able to sort of go listen.
Linda Ronstadt
#12. There should not be a question of legal or illegal immigration. People came and immigrated to this country from the time of the Indians. No one's illegal. They should just be able to come.
Linda Ronstadt
#13. To sing with Frank Sinatra in any capacity at all is overwhelming.
Linda Ronstadt
#14. So goodbye, I'll be leaving, I see no sense in this crying and grieving. We'll both live a lot longer, if you live without me.
Linda Ronstadt
#15. Marijuana has a lot of very good medical uses, and I truly believe it should be legal, but for just recreational use it wasn't my drug. I didn't like it.
Linda Ronstadt
#16. I wish I had as much in bed as I get in the newspapers.
Linda Ronstadt
#17. You have the United States, and you have Mexico, and then you have this Mexican-American thing which is this third culture, which I like to call Aztlan.
Linda Ronstadt
#18. I believe in the empirical wisdom of science, just to start with, so I hope that there might be some treatment out there that might be helpful.
Linda Ronstadt
#19. Art is for healing ourselves, and everybody needs their own personal art to heal up their problems.
Linda Ronstadt
#20. Full disclosure here - I had a terrible crush on Smokey Robinson, like every other female on the planet.
Linda Ronstadt
#21. Somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight, someone's thinking of me and loving me tonight.
Linda Ronstadt
#22. I thought everybody could sing, because everybody in my family could.
Linda Ronstadt
#23. I listen mostly to live music, and mostly my musical experience was playing music with other people.
Linda Ronstadt
#24. Ninety-eight percent of the singing I did was private singing - it was in the shower, at the dishwasher, driving my car, singing with the radio, whatever. I can't do any of that now. I wish I could. I don't miss performing, particularly, but I miss singing.
Linda Ronstadt
#25. The thing you have to be prepared for is that other people don't always dream your dream.
Linda Ronstadt
#26. I had a galvanised voice: I could sing through a 105 fever or a flu or a root canal or anything that you could throw at me.
Linda Ronstadt
#27. Cocaine made people deaf, it made people dead and it made people real obnoxious.
Linda Ronstadt
#29. It's a real conflict for me when I go to a concert and find out somebody in the audience is a Republican or fundamental Christian. It can cloud my enjoyment. I'd rather not know.
Linda Ronstadt
#30. I think if you do what's in your heart - Joseph Campbell always says you have to follow your bliss, and if you do, doors open where you didn't even realize there were doors.
Linda Ronstadt
#31. As I got older, I got Parkinson's disease, so I couldn't sing at all. That's what happened to me. I was singing at my best strength when I developed Parkinson's. I think I've had it for quite a while.
Linda Ronstadt
#32. I grew up in a big sky country. Then I lived in Manhattan, where you can only see the sky between buildings, and then I went into a building where you couldn't see the sky at all. I didn't like that so much.
Linda Ronstadt
#33. The only reason to be with somebody is that they make you a better person and you make them a better person.
Linda Ronstadt
#34. My feeling about school was that it interfered with my reading.
Linda Ronstadt
#35. Your musical soul is like facets of a jewel, and you stick out one facet at a time ... (and) I tend to work real hard on whatever it is I do, to get it up to speed, up to a professional level. I tend to bury myself in one thing for years at a time.
Linda Ronstadt
#36. I've been lucky in my life to work with people who I consider master singers.
Linda Ronstadt
#37. The smell of the carpet in a hotel room is the same everywhere.
Linda Ronstadt
#38. American radio from the '30s through the '60s was just fabulous. There was such a diversity.
Linda Ronstadt
#39. Having children makes you see the world in a completely different way. When you're responsible for those little lives, you can't slough it off or forget about it until later.
Linda Ronstadt
#40. A lot of singers that I've heard that I may not like their sensibility, but I see that they're entitled to whatever they get. People don't get there without talent, they really don't.
Linda Ronstadt
#41. I'm a chameleon. I can change my voice a lot. I always was able to, because in my family's music, I was a harmony singer, and harmony singing is really hard.
Linda Ronstadt
#42. I used to live with J.D. Souther, and I would watch him write. He's be sitting, he'd say something, and then he'd write it down. That's craft.
Linda Ronstadt
#43. We were raised with the idea that we had limitless chances and we got very shocked to learn that wasn't the case.
Linda Ronstadt
#44. Every single year since they invented sound recording it gets better and better. We've always improved it. With MP3, which just sounds awful, it's the first time in the history of recorded music that it sounds worse. It's really - and it's everywhere, it's ubiquitous.
Linda Ronstadt
#45. Singing with Aaron Neville, he pulled stuff out of my voice I never could have gotten, because if he's providing XYZ, I have to put in ABC, and usually I don't have to put in ABC.
Linda Ronstadt
#46. I had a lot of chances to do things that other people don't ever get, and I have to be content with that. I have to look around for some other way to make myself useful.
Linda Ronstadt
#47. Life's full of loss, who knows the cost, living in the memory of the love that never was.
Linda Ronstadt
#48. Everywhere you go, there's a soundtrack. You can't really quite hear it. It's just a little out of the range of hearing.
Linda Ronstadt
#49. I am a believer in discipline; it takes a lot to do well. You need discipline for those little excursions into the chaotic that make life interesting.
Linda Ronstadt
#50. I was never bored because I always had a book. So I had a doorway into another world or another universe. It was great.
Linda Ronstadt
#51. What my true addiction is is reading. I love to read. If I'd get too loaded, I couldn't remember the sentence I just read.
Linda Ronstadt
#52. I got a couple of different contacts from publishing companies saying they'd be interested in a book about my work: not a kiss-and-tell book, which I specifically put in the contract. Just a book about my work and what I did.
Linda Ronstadt
#53. I didn't love Jim Morrison. There was something very reptilian about him. And I didn't care for his singing, but his band! The Doors were fantastic.
Linda Ronstadt
#54. Being a celebrity made me so uncomfortable that I would have preferred standing behind the amplifiers.
Linda Ronstadt
#55. You don't forget you have Parkinson's disease, believe me, especially in the shower. If you are not paying attention, you fall down.
Linda Ronstadt
#56. The whole thing with recording is you have to know when to turn off the tape machine and just stop recording because you want to keep fixing, fixing, fixing, you know?
Linda Ronstadt
#58. The relentless touring and endless repetition of the same songs over and over again promoted a creeping awareness that my music had begun to sound like my washing machine.
Linda Ronstadt
#59. I grew up singing Mexican music, and that's based on indigenous Mexican rhythms. Mexican music also has an overlay of West African music, based on huapango drums, and it's kind of like a 6/8 time signature, but it really is a very syncopated 6/8. And that's how I attack vocals.
Linda Ronstadt
#60. I get on the airplane and there's a screen in front of everything. You get into a taxicab in New York, there's a screen blinking at you. I think it's going to have a tremendous effect on our brains, because those bright, saturated colors and those strong lines, they do things to your brain.
Linda Ronstadt
#61. Even though I know how very far apart we are, it helps to think we might be wishing underneath the same bright star.
Linda Ronstadt
#62. I love everything soft, cashmere and down. I don't like anything scratchy.
Linda Ronstadt
#63. Music is a work in progress. On a record, it gets frozen in time. And it's oddly unnatural.
Linda Ronstadt
#64. When I was taking arithmetic in the first grade I said to myself, "I'm going to be a singer. I don't have to worry about numbers." I didn't think I was going to be famous or a star.
Linda Ronstadt
#65. In the Troubadour days, it was all those songwriters that I hung around with all the time, so I could get songs and find out what was going on. So we all knew each other, and we just carried each other's word around.
Linda Ronstadt
#66. I think that Frank Sinatra was maybe the greatest pop singer.
Linda Ronstadt
#67. Ninety-nine percent of singing is listening and hearing, and so then 1 percent of it is singing.
Linda Ronstadt
#69. Judy Henske, who was the then reigning queen of folk music, said to me at The Troubadour, 'Honey, in this town there are four sexes. Men, women, homosexuals, and girl singers.'
Linda Ronstadt
#70. Men are very delicate. They don't like being rejected.
Linda Ronstadt
#71. I think there's just a lot of compassion in art. Again, when you're doing something that resonates with somebody else, you're going through an experience another person has had, whether it's been a painful experience or a joyous experience or a happy experience.
Linda Ronstadt
#72. I'd go over to my grandmother's house, and she'd be playing opera. They loved opera. Not only did they play it on the radio, but they played it on their piano. Everybody learned how to read music and how to play.
Linda Ronstadt
#73. The trip home always seemed to take half the time, because Murphy and Little Paint were eager for their dinner. We clung like burrs on their backs and rode like the wind. We were eager for our dinner too.
Linda Ronstadt
#74. I can remember sitting at the piano. My sister was playing, and my brother was singing something, and I said, 'I want to try that.'
Linda Ronstadt
#75. I'm your basic atheist that believes in maybe - I'm a spiritual atheist.
Linda Ronstadt
#76. Up until about a hundred years ago, the world was dark at night. You got to have a real night so you could sleep.
Linda Ronstadt
#77. I never wrote anything down. I never kept a diary, never kept a journal. I did write one letter home about touring with the Doors that I used as a reference for the book for some details there, and then I was glad I had that, but that was it.
Linda Ronstadt
#78. Everybody has their own level of doing their music ... Mine just happened to resonate over the years, in one way and another, with a significant enough number of people so that I could do it professionally.
Linda Ronstadt
#79. I think there's mind in nature. There's a power in nature, and there's a universal power that you'd better not ignore.
Linda Ronstadt
#80. What I think is the universal, wonderful thing about music, is that it's very inclusive.
Linda Ronstadt
#81. The thing I like about singing duets is that I get things out of my voice I never get singing by myself.
Linda Ronstadt
#82. I got to sing with Placido Domingo ... I got to sing with Aaron Neville, who is one of my favorites. Got to sing with Brian Wilson, one of the great high tenors. And Ricky Skaggs, a bluegrass tenor. I'm also proud of my musical friendship with Emmylou Harris.
Linda Ronstadt
#83. Giggling is a plague on the nervous system that I believe is hardwired into some people's physiology and seems to be a reaction to tremendous nerves, fatigue, or self-consciousness. It is rarely a welcome occurrence to the giggler and can feel like going over Niagara Falls without a barrel
Linda Ronstadt
#85. I always say if music can't make you cry, you're a hopeless case. I don't cry very much myself, but it's my job to make you cry.
Linda Ronstadt
#86. I've got this weird body chemistry that I don't like to get high. I'm not going to say I never tried drugs. I tried most everything. I didn't try injectables. But I didn't like it.
Linda Ronstadt
#87. In committing to artistic growth, you have to refine your skills to support your instincts.
Linda Ronstadt
#88. For years, I've been interviewed, and they write what they thought I thought or what they thought I said. Sometimes it's accurate, and often it isn't.
Linda Ronstadt
#89. I never thought I'd write, because I'd never written anything in my whole life.
Linda Ronstadt
#90. I think the zenith of popular songwriting to the United States of America was that period that started in the '20s and went into the '50s. It was the period of the great American standard song.
Linda Ronstadt
#92. I didn't think I was a famous singer. I didn't think I was a star or that I could make the waters part - just that singing was what I was going to do.
Linda Ronstadt
#93. I know my own father's business was very dependent on the goodwill and business and trade from people in northern Mexico. We knew their families and went to their weddings and baptisms and balls and picnics, and we had a great time with them.
Linda Ronstadt
#94. The constant fear of a performer is to become what is reflected back at you.
Linda Ronstadt
#95. I grew up in Arizona. I love it. I'm a part of the desert. I feel like, really, I'm from the Sonoran Desert, which is - extends to both sides of the border. I'm really from that part of Mexico, also. And I hate that there's a fence, you know, running through it.
Linda Ronstadt
#96. The essential elements of singing are voice, musicianship, and story. It is the rare artist that has all three in abundance.
Linda Ronstadt
#97. In the United States, we spend millions of dollars on sports because it promotes teamwork, discipline, and the experience of learning to make great progress in small increments. Learning to play music does all this and more.
Linda Ronstadt
#98. We've got blue light, we've got all this light flooding our bedrooms and things blinking, and you can't get a decent night's sleep.
Linda Ronstadt
#99. When I would be on the stage singing, I would see a movie of something that happened, I would be telling the story. I would be describing the story in sound, but my goal would be to make somebody else run their own movie.
Linda Ronstadt
#100. I used to feel kind of impatient with people who couldn't do things fast or couldn't remember stuff.
Linda Ronstadt
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