Quotes from Billie Holiday

Everyones got to be different. You can't copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. And without feeling, whatever you do amounts to nothing.

Love is like a faucet: it turns on and off.

In this country, don't forget, a habit is no damn private hell. There's no solitary confinement outside of jail. A habit is hell for those you love. And in this country it's the worst kind of hell for those who love you.

Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what's more than enough.

Sometimes it's worse to win a fight than to lose.

You can get in just as much trouble by being dumb and innocent as you can by breaking the law.

Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do anything better. All dope can do for you is kill you - and kill you the long, slow, hard way. And it can kill the people you love right along with you.

You've got to have something to eat

I guess I'm not the only one who heard their first good jazz in a whorehouse. But I never tried to make anything of it. If I'd heard Louis and Bessie at a Girl Scout jamboree, I'd have loved it just the same.

Tony kept my job open. He offered to backstop me with the money I needed. But it was the way he did it I'll never forget, with love and respect, like a human being holding out his hand to someone who needed it.

If you find a tune and it's got something to do with you, you don't have to evolve anything. You just feel it, and when you sing it other people can feel something too.

It was during my stint at Café Society that a song was born which became my personal protest—" Strange Fruit." The germ of the song was in a poem written by Lewis Allen. I first met him at Café Society. When he showed me that poem, I dug it right off. It seemed to spell out all the things that had killed Pop.

Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn't treat them, and then caught them, prosecuted them for not paying their taxes, and then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs. The jails are full and the problem is getting worse every day. p153

I had the white gowns and the white shoes. And every night they'd bring me the white gardenias and the white junk. When I was on, I was on and nobody gave me any trouble. No cops, no Treasury agents, nobody. I got into trouble when I tried to get off.

Mom just loved people. Part of this might have come from never wanting to be alone, where she could only brood over Pop. Part of it must have come from her fears for me. She knew she wouldn't be around for very long to take care of me. There was damn little she could do to protect me after she was gone. All she had was me. All I had was her.

It still depresses me every time I sing it, though. It reminds me of how Pop died. But I have to keep singing it, not only because people ask for it but because twenty years after Pop died the things that killed him are still happening in the South.

When I sing it, it affects me so much I get sick. It takes all the strength out of me.

Everyone's got to be different. You can't copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. And without feeling, whatever you do amounts to nothing. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.

People don't understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it.

If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all.

I'm always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I've been.

One day a whole damn song fell into place in my head.

I don't think I missed a single picture Billie Dove ever made. I was crazy for her. I tried to do my hair like her, and eventually, I borrowed her name.

No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.