Quotes from Anohni

When a person only knows abuse, they shift their whole emotional and spiritual life into the context of that abuse. If all you've ever known is to be hurt by the one that pretends to love you, then many times you go to the one who hurts you for love.

Hopelessness is a feeling. It's not a fact.

Look at the American history of slavery. Can you say that hundreds of years later that has been eased? That pain has not yet been eased.

We're not just polluting a river and killing a couple of top predator animals; we're eradicating the krill, the necessary algae. We're dismantling the insect and amphibian worlds. We're going for the building blocks.

My being bought as a politically outspoken artist is a more potent advertising tool for Apple than a 100 more explicit ads.

This illusion that a lower class has less intelligence than a higher class is a complete fake-out.

My favourite moment from the Oscars was when Brando didn't attend and sent a Native American woman to talk about Wounded Knee. She delivered a very unpopular and lengthy monologue about the injustice for indigenous people in North America. It was one of the greatest moments in American television.

God - God's the wrong word - goddess or nature will conspire to transform you in a way you couldn't have imagined.

I've always been transgender, and I always will be. Having said that, my spirit is feminine. If you had to divide humanity into two groups, I would sit with the women.

I had this voice when I was in high school, except nobody thought much of it then. I developed it by imitating singers I admired - Alison Moyet, Boy George, later on Nina Simone.

It's a feminine universe, and every person who has ever tried to convince you otherwise is doing little more than pounding on his mother's breast, enraged by the predicament he faces as a leaf, dangling from the tree of life.

More and more - especially the younger generation - are functioning outside the binary concept of gender. That's just next-generation stuff.

At the end of the day, the sovereignty of maleness is an illusion. In essence and in origin, we are all entirely female.

Participation in and of itself is an act against hopelessness. Speaking up is a gesture against hopelessness.

Only an intervention by women around the world, with their innate knowledge of interdependency, deep listening, empathy and self-sacrifice, could possibly alter our species' desperate course.

Women are women, and so are men, and the delusion that we are spiritually separate from or are about to spiritually separate from the rest of existence is a psychosis that spins us into virulence.

We've been playing in the sandbox of creation for millions of years. We ruin one environment, we move on to the next - manifest destiny. Now it's hitting us collectively: Our mother's life is in our hands.

I was never going to become a beautiful, passable woman, and I was never going to be a man. It's a quandary. But the trans condition is a beautiful mystery; it's one of nature's best ideas.

I've always been somewhat uncomfortable on the stage, and I've always felt like physically having to negotiate my own presence as a part of presenting work has always been a source of angst for me.

I would never undermine a person's interpretation of a creative work.

You see artists hailed as a new generation of independents, only to be enlisted to leverage product.

As a transgendered artist, I have always occupied a place outside of the mainstream. I have gladly paid a price for speaking my truth in the face of loathing and idiocy.

As Donald Trump and his cabinet now demonstrate, the skills encouraged in men by their biologies and the tools that boys master in the playground have not equipped them to deal with the unprecedented global crisis we are now facing.

We're being challenged to do something so profound, it's unprecedented in the history of our species, and there couldn't be more at stake. It's not even our species at stake; it's the whole dream of life on earth that's taken 4.5 billion years to realize - all this beautiful pastoral life on earth.