Quotes from Emmylou Harris

There's a certain grace in accepting what your life is and embracing all the good things that have been - but there's still an expectation of good things to come. Not necessarily what you expected.

To me acting and singing are worlds apart.

You get to a certain point in your life where you get closer to the end of your life than the beginning, and it colors your life, in a way.

Pretty much all I say politically is I encourage people to register to vote.

I find with records, they become what they're going to become. They take on a power and a direction of their own. Part of making records is to honor that and not try to force it.

To me acting and singing are worlds apart.

My parents were not very happy. They were very worried about me pursuing a career that even if I had talent might not give me the happiness and the success that they - any parent hopes for their child.

The only time I ever appeared in the Enquirer was for a piece about people who let their hair grow gray. I guess I'm not much of a wild child.

I'm blessed to be able to work at something that I'm good at, and that I love. It's not something I take for granted.

I love singing. The joy of singing live - I don't think I will ever stop that.

I love Chicago, but I didn't think I had enough soul to be a Cubs fan.

I'm even able to have kind of a little bit of a second career in dog rescue. Doesn't pay anything, but it's become a real passion for me.

I'm not a trained musician. When folks talk about 'Well, you go to this or that' - the tenor, or the third part - I don't really know what they're talking about.

I have to have a guitar sitting around. I sing in the shower. I sing around the house. The music comes secondary. The lyrics come first.

In 1974 I was trying to get my first little band together. That year marked kind of a traumatic point in my life, but I had a lot of support from friends and family and a lot of good things ended up coming out of it.

The reason you write [songs] is because there's something you want to say that is important to you - enough to go through all the torture of writing.

As citizens we have to be more thoughtful and more educated and more informed. I turn on the TV and I see these grown people screaming at each other, and I think, well, if we don't get our civility back, we're in trouble.

I don't ever worry about whether I'm being true to my country roots. My country roots were adopted. I never worry about what I can do and what I should do. I just do what I want to do.

I have my own biography of Gram Parsons - I don't want to be part of somebody else's.

Somehow, when you think about yourself in old age, you think you're going to be this completely different person that you don't even recognize - because you can't imagine it, you know?

Yes, I always say that we're a National League band. What I mean is, if you play an instrument, you have to sing. So I always call our drummer up. Even the drummer has to take a turn on the microphone.

You know, I'm a fan of Laurie Anderson. One of my favorite records is 'The Ugly One With the Jewels,' a spoken-word record. It's an extraordinary album.

I like to think about stringing songs together like a string of pearls, or a string of beads, but ultimately it has to be stuff that really works with the band, and gives a spin to the older material.

I'm very influenced by landscapes, not so much the way places look as the way the names sound. In this country we've got so many cultures, and the place names - the Spanish names and the Indian names, which are so incredibly musical.