Quotes from Mary Gauthier

When I first got sober, I hadn't read anything for six or seven years. I didn't have even that much focus.

I got sober at 27 and started writing around 30 and started playing music in public around 32, 33.

When I finally got sober, I moved towards what I might have been if I hadn't been destroying myself when I was young.

I would make a terrible soldier, because I don't follow orders.

I've learned our soldiers are so much like everybody else. They're just put into an extreme situation.

That's the reality in the Catholic Church today You don't want to build something that will be OK for now, when you know this large population is going to get bigger.

A song is an emotional lightning bolt - a good one, anyway.

As a songwriter, I was always mining my own depths, which were filled with confusion and darkness.

We can't see ourselves very clearly. This I learned as a songwriter. I'm forever trying to figure out what my own truth is.

When I became a songwriter, it was out of some sort of desperation. I needed to create something. I had to latch on to something, and the guitar was what I grabbed.

Fundamentally, our job as songwriters is to sit down and listen.

A lot of songwriters have written about soldiers and war, but very few have written with them.

People in Ireland take in the whole song. After a long history of great singers and songwriters and poets, they are able to consume the entire song - not just the external; they go inside.

Creating something beautiful out of pain helps ease the pain. So, that's kind of how I got to songwriting - quite honestly out of desperation.

I think Bob Dylan showed us that songs can rise to the level of literature, and he proved it over and over again. That's why they keep trying to get him a Nobel Prize for literature: because there is no Nobel Prize for songwriting.

Recovery stabilized me; songwriting gave me a purpose.

In a lot of ways, songwriting helped save my life.

I'm grateful to songwriting and recovery to bringing me to a place of peace.

Once I got my life sorted and started to get healthy, then I was able to focus on writing.

Songs bring us into connection with each other. When they resonate, when we're in resonance, singing together, we become one for that 3 1/2 or four minutes the song lasts. It takes away that isolated loneliness that modern life is so full of.

I did not know that if a member of a family serves, the whole family serves. I did not know that the spouses of our service members carry such a heavy load.

I think it's a stereotype that soldiers don't talk, because my experience is that they will talk if they are met with empathy and no judgment.

I think I'll always draw from being a person that doesn't know how to have a normal life, whatever a normal life is.

The belief when your mother gives you away is that there's something deeply wrong. Mothers don't give babies away. There's something wrong with me, something unlovable, something seriously flawed in me. It's a fundamental thing; it's precognitive. You feel it rather than think it. How could you not?