Joanna Newsom Quotes

41 Sourced Quotes

Go to sleep, you stunning sky, gently creep, cunning by
A quiet hum is amplified by your thumb that you suck dry
A hundred raging waters snare the lonely sigh
Hold your breath and clasp at Cassiopeia.

Joanna Newsom

While yonder, wild and blue,
the wild blue yonder looms.
'Till we are wracked with rheum,
by roads, by songs entombed.

Joanna Newsom

It is too short —
the day we are born,
we commence with our dying.

Joanna Newsom

We sailed away on a winter's day
With fate as malleable as clay
But ships are fallible, I say
And the nautical, as all things, fades.

Joanna Newsom

Emily, I saw you last night by the river
I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water
Frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever
In a mud cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky'd been breathing on a mirror.

Joanna Newsom

With the loneliness
of you mighty men,
with your mighty kiss
that might never, never end,
while, so far away,
in the seat of the West,
burns the fount
of the heat
of that loneliness.

Joanna Newsom

Well, Nabokov is definitely my favorite author, though I feel strange calling him an "influence," since I can't trace the ways in which his writing may or may not have seeped into my own. But I also love William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, Kenneth Patchen, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Mark Helprin (who wrote a beautiful book called Winter's Tale), and Kurt Vonnegut. My favorite book of all time is The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle.

Joanna Newsom

And everything with wings is restless,
aimless, drunk and dour;
butterflies and birds collide, at hot ungodly hours.
And my clay-coloured motherlessness rangily reclines;
come on home now!
All my bones are dolorous with vines!

Joanna Newsom

But it can make you feel over, and old
(Lord, you know it's a shame),
when I only want for you to pull over,
and hold me,
till I can't remember my own name.

Joanna Newsom

I can't call them linear narratives, and I can't call them chronological in a traditional, classical sense; I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I borrow more from William Faulkner than William Shakespeare. I just find it funny that at this point, we see a collection of highly charged, highly potent symbols as referring back to a classical aesthetic, because to me they seem deeply connected to the pedestrian actuality of real life.

Joanna Newsom

It does not suffice
for you to say I am a sweet girl,
or to say you hate to see me sad
because of you.
It does not suffice,
to merely lie beside each other,
as those who love each other do.

Joanna Newsom

And though our bones, they may break
And our souls separate,
why the long face?
And though our bodies recoil
From the grip of the soil,
why the long face?

Joanna Newsom

And the love we hold, and the love we spurn,
Will never grow cold, only taciturn

Joanna Newsom

And a thimble's worth of milky moon
Can touch hearts larger than a thimble.

Joanna Newsom

Coats of bouclé, jacquard and cashmere;
cartouche and tweed, all silver shot —
and everything that could remind you
of how easy I was not.

Joanna Newsom

"Have you come, then, to rescue me?"
He laughed and said, "from what, 'Colleen'?"
You dried and dressed most willingly.
You corseted, and caught the dread disease
by which one comes to know such peace."

Joanna Newsom

The tap of hangers,
swaying in the closet —
unburdened hooks
and empty drawers —
and everywhere I tried to love you
is yours again,
and only yours.

Joanna Newsom

Water were your limbs
And the fire was your hair
And then the moon caught your eye,
and you rose through the air.
Well if you've seen true light,
then this is my prayer:
Will you call me
When you get there?

Joanna Newsom

Hung from the underbelly of the Earth
While the stars skid away below
Gormless and brakeless; gravel-loose
Falling silent as gavels in the snow.

Joanna Newsom

Well I'm starvin' and freezin'
In this measly old bed
(Then I'll crawl across the salt flats
To stroke your sweet head)
Come across the desert,
with no shoes on?
(I love you truly,
or I love no-one)

Joanna Newsom

I may have changed, it's hard to gauge
Time won't account for how I've aged
Would that I could tie your lying tongue
Who says that leaving keeps you young.

Joanna Newsom

I have a lot of interest in interior rhyming; not just rhyming at the end of the lines, but playing around with rhymes within the lines, playing with where the syllabic emphases in the sentences are, lining those up at strange moments in the line of the song. I'm not sure if that comes across or not.

Joanna Newsom

Now her coat drags through the water,
Bagging, with a life's-worth of hunger, limitless minnows
In the magnetic embrace,
Balletic and glacial, of Bear's insatiable shadow.

Joanna Newsom

And all that we built, and all that we breathed
And all that we spilled or pulled up like weeds
Is piled up in back and it burns irrevocably
And we spoke up in turns 'til the silence crept over me.

Joanna Newsom

And, for the sake of that pit of snakes,
for whom did you allay your shyness,
and spend all your mercy, and madness, and grace,
in a day, beneath the bending cypress?

Joanna Newsom

Then the slow lip of fire moves across the prairie with precision
While, somewhere, with your pliers and glue, you make your first incision
And, in a moment of almost-unbearable vision, doubled over with the hunger of lions
'Hold me close', cooed the dove, who was stuffed now with sawdust and diamonds.

Joanna Newsom

In this life, who did you love,
beneath the drifting ashes,
beneath the sheeting banks of air
that barrenly bore our rations?

Joanna Newsom

Wolf-spider, crouch in your funnel nest.
If I knew you, once,
now I know you less.
In the sinking sand,
where we've come to rest,
have I had a hand in your loneliness?

Joanna Newsom

Held her there,
kicking and mewling,
upended, unspooling, unsung and blue;
told her "wherever you go,
little runaway bunny,
I will find you."
And then she ran,
as they're liable to do.

Joanna Newsom

Driven through by her own sword,
summer died last night, alone.

Joanna Newsom