Mary Chapin Carpenter Quotes

God forgives somehow we have yet to learn the same.

I love to write songs and sing them, and I didn’t really know much more than that. Somehow it’s gotten to the point where a friend can say, “It’s very you,” and that made me feel good.

There’s timing. And then there’s also certain people at the record company who worked incredibly hard and were incredibly enthusiastic about what I was doing.

I take my chances. I can’t cling to remorse or regret.

I kept thinking, I went to college and I have to get a real job.

I’m a liberal arts junkie.

It’s a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they’ve connected to it. That’s what I’m after.

About age ten, we moved from the place where I was born, moved overseas.

You know, that single girl life and that sense of isolation – that doesn’t leave you just like that. And that’s what that song is about. I remember that, and that is imprinted on me, that sense.

I’m a bit of a perfectionist. I want to try it again and again, and a lot of times my fellow musicians have to hold me back and say, “Nah, I think we got it.”

I’ve never… when I was having songs on the airwaves, and that sort of thing, I never felt a sense of pressure anywhere except from myself, to do things the way I wanted to do them; to feel authentic; to feel like I was presenting my true self to the world.

Some people say that you should not tempt fate and for them I cannot disagree, but I never learned anything from playing it safe. I say fate should not tempt me.

We all have two lives. The one we are given and the one we create.

I don’t think you need to dumb down to a child, you merely have to be clear, you know?

So I came home and I had a resume and everything, but the only job experience I had was just playing in bars and clubs on my summers off. So, I was temping and stuff during the day and playing music at night.

The bedrock thing of country music is, it’s about storytelling. I feel like I was able to find a niche because I connected to that in some way.

You know, I didn’t have enough money to quit my day job… the myth of the major label deal. Nowadays, you have a tour bus and a stylist and all this stuff. But back then, no way.

Dreamland is a book, but it’s my song in book form. It’s translated itself into a different medium.

I like to feel that every day or most days, I do a little bit of writing. I am a creature of habit in terms of the way I live.

I found Elvis on the Internet, I went camping with a young cadet, he showed me his bayonet.

I was a liberal arts junkie and I figured, well, I’ll go work for somebody somewhere. All I knew was that I was going to have to come home and figure it out.

Life is never a straight line – it’s peaks and valleys. Why would you want to be the same person every day of your life?

When I think of the artists I admire and seek out musically. It’s because I’m curious about where they’re going to go the next time they have a chance to put a record out. It’s not about where I find them on the radio dial, or how many records they’re selling.

My sisters and I were fortunate to travel through Asia and Europe at very young ages. We confronted extraordinary beauty in Athens and unspeakable poverty in India.

Was it a light only she could see? A gypsy’s spell? A mystery?

I went to college and I never allowed myself to think for an instant that I would have this chance to do this.

So I think that if I do feel more freedom right now in my career, it’s not so much because I have less at stake but more a sense that I’ve learned more.

Emmy Lou Harris introduced me to the work of the Vietnam Veterans of America foundation and the Campaign for a Land Mine Free World.

A dreamer born is a hero bred.

I feel that it’s nothing if not an incredible privilege to be able to get up on stage and play for people, and I don’t ever take it for granted.

I was really young, but I can’t say that I wrote much of anything. I liked to scribble; I thought of it as that. But I was playing guitar and ukulele when I was in second grade.

I don’t really remember my folks singing to us, but they read to us.