Top 50 Feist Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’m a nostalgic person and I really like rehashing and digging around the mental trunks.”

— Feist

2. “You realize time isn’t just a period that you tell a story within – it becomes a major character in the film. There is no beginning, middle, end because there is always stuff beginning and ending simultaneously.”

— Feist

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

3. “I like being swept up in weather and observing it as something beautiful and giant.”

— Feist

4. “There’s something about live recordings now that’s too hi-fi.”

— Feist

5. “When I’m in a city that’s just clean, concrete lines, I get really short of breath and confused. It’s much more interesting to me when nature is creeping back and tearing the mortar apart between the bricks.”

— Feist

6. “But that constant adjustment and adaptation to your new environment, all the variables are the same. There’s always a promoter, there’s always a rider, there’s always a shower, and there’s always a stage.”

— Feist

7. “When you say something or sing something enough times, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s almost like casting spells. I don’t mean necessarily in the flighty, ‘I’m going to go buy a cloak with a hood now’ way.”

— Feist

8. “If you keep bashing your head against the same wall, at some point you’re going to fall over and be still for awhile.”

— Feist

9. “I know more than I knew before I didn’t rest I didn’t stop Did we fight or did we talk.”

— Feist

10. “I really love watching the 70s live performance TV series “The Midnight Special” and “The Old Grey Whistle Test”. Those are the best performances you’ve ever seen, and they sound incredible.”

— Feist

11. “With music, I wasn’t curious anymore. There was no dialogue. By the time I stopped, I knew it wasn’t going to be gone forever, but it just wasn’t the right time for me to care about that.”

— Feist

12. “If you calculate every single thing you could possibly need in your life, you would need no more than 200 people to keep all that afloat: a doctor, food, wine, cheese-eating friends, the person who makes paper, the shoemaker...”

— Feist

13. “It’s amazing when you find a photo of your grandparents when they were young because it’s black and white and the care that they put into their appearance back then was so grown up and specific to that era.”

— Feist

14. “There’s nothing better than not knowing what’s going to happen until you put the pieces together.”

— Feist

15. “I had to let myself imagine a calendar with no lines; when every single day is being predetermined six months in advance, there’s no more fluidity to time.”

— Feist

16. “Instead of just looking back, whiplash-style, I can assume there’s something else coming. Time just folds over itself, like origami.”

— Feist

17. “And of course, pop music is all about memorability and simplicity and positive messages and a little dash of joy.”

— Feist

18. “I think I prefer the constant renewal. It’s almost like sandpapering down any details or any contour of familiarities.”

— Feist

19. “Be alone even when there’s a million people around, because tomorrow it will be a different million people.”

— Feist

20. “Surreal can be exciting and good, and it can be like living inside an alien landscape, and it can be completely interesting, or you can be alienated from your own life – inside your own life, it doesnt feel familiar any more.”

— Feist

21. “Gatekeeper was sort of my first attempt to put a little bit of a frame and boundaries around songwriting, and try to figure out a way to approach it that had a sort of end result in mind. I havent written many like that.”

— Feist

22. “I would try to pick the guitar up sometimes, like, “Hey, remember me?” It was like reintroducing yourself to someone who’s got a grudge.”

— Feist

23. “I don’t want to take photographs that I won’t recognize as myself, and myself isn’t necessarily just blankly staring at the lens.”

— Feist

24. “I didn’t really get London until I read Dickens. Then I was charmed to death by it.”

— Feist

25. “The group-effort sound in recording of Sea Lion is like, you really hear all the people in the room and hear them interlocking. Theres a real freight-train energy of all these people at the same time playing.”

— Feist

26. “I know I’m sane I don’t give a care for the crown or the shield I will not protect you or happily yield To the one who makes me come undone.”

— Feist

27. “Everything becomes closer once you realize that the world is only as far away as a nap and a meal.”

— Feist

28. “You hit a guitar, you hit a note, you hit a drum, you hit an organ. Meat and potatoes. Simplicity. Not getting too caught up in little tweezers of perfection.”

— Feist

29. “I never really lived outside of the city growing up, but I’m always looking in between the lines of the city, and I magnetize over to the green spots.”

— Feist

30. “You just never set roots; you take pleasure in simple conversations, because you know you’re not going to have much more than that. It’s very isolating, and that can be a good thing.”

— Feist

31. “I don’t think that village idea of actually knowing what you’re contributing to the whole exists anymore.”

— Feist

32. “A year’s a long time, but it also flickers past in no time at all.”

— Feist

33. “I haven’t been living anywhere because I’ve been on tour for the past two years.”

— Feist

34. “I spent some time in France, visited Egypt and Mexico City. I hung out, biked around, planted some tomatoes. I did everything except wake up in a new town everyday. It was really boring. It’s just life.”

— Feist

35. “You can get anywhere on earth by falling asleep.”

— Feist

36. “I said I’d stop for a year, which was inconceivable to me and everyone around me. It seemed like so long. But then, after that year, I looked up and I still hadn’t gotten my land legs back at all.”

— Feist

37. “I think that’s more a reflection of the fact I’ve never been a student of any particular school of writing, or even listening.”

— Feist

38. “I had a guitar leaning against the wall and I’d squint at it. It was almost like a dog that had been kicked – I didn’t think I had anything to offer it.”

— Feist

39. “There’s real potency in metal. Metal fans love metal as if it’s a nation they would fight for. It’s not diluted by pop culture.”

— Feist

40. “For me, the best part is people who watch the movie and tell me it inspired them to collaborate with their friend who’s a photographer or filmmaker.”

— Feist

41. “I guess there are a lot of people out there that think they’re supposed to define themselves in isolation, but that’s not necessarily the case.”

— Feist

42. “I find it pretty fascinating how humans keep gravitating towards these giant centers. I went to this walled medieval village in France this year, and it was truly the most crazy, beautiful, bizarre place I’ve ever been.”

— Feist

43. “I’ve always been a bit wary of keyboards because there’s an invisibility to it – you’re not really hitting anything.”

— Feist

44. “Any kind of anthemic song, for the most part, they’re on the positive side of things. It’s not hard to identify when a melody is just one degree too complicated or one degree too simple and where that line of pop memorability lies.”

— Feist

45. “I’ve never been drawn to concert DVDs because they take away the part of the equation that’s most important to seeing a live show: getting jostled around and feeling the energy in the room. I definitely didn’t want to make one of those.”

— Feist

46. “I was in a crazy, private, awesome bubble again, and that’s when I started to write.”

— Feist

47. “Musically, I didn’t relate to Berlin. There seemed to be a lot of machine music made there – I don’t think I saw a stringed instrument in two years.”

— Feist

48. “I wrote the album in the fall. In about four months, I went from zero to finished. It usually takes forever.”

— Feist

49. “Songwriting is a really fortunate skill to have to frame living and to find new ways to observe things you’re going through.”

— Feist

50. “Probably, on some subconscious level, I was motivated by not wanting to spoon-feed any similar flavors.”

— Feist