Top 30 Natalie Merchant Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Poetry comes alive to me through recitation.”

— Natalie Merchant

2. “For your kindness, I’m in debt to you. For your selflessness, my admiration.”

— Natalie Merchant

3. “I go to the river from time to time to ponder over the crazy days in my life. Watch the river flow, ease my mind and soul where I go.”

— Natalie Merchant

4. “I’ve raised my daughter with no television.”

— Natalie Merchant

5. “I was shy. Bookish. The kind of 13-year-old girl who, instead of having a boyfriend, would have a crush on a dead, 19th-century author!”

— Natalie Merchant

6. “I don’t want to live in a culture of despair. I’d like to live in a culture of hope.”

— Natalie Merchant

7. “I’m on this search trying to figure out exactly who I am and what I have to say to people.”

— Natalie Merchant

8. “I’ve never sold my publishing. I have 100% control of all of my publishing and that includes everything, every use of my songs.”

— Natalie Merchant

9. “I think I don’t invest so much time in thinking about people’s sexuality. I just take people as individuals.”

— Natalie Merchant

10. “I can’t remove the autobiographical slant from the things I write. You always bring yourself into what you’re writing.”

— Natalie Merchant

11. “I would never do a printed memoir. I’ve been asked to publish a memoir from years by different publishers and literary agents. I think it wouldn’t be great for me because all I’d really want to talk about it music and I’d rather just play it.”

— Natalie Merchant

12. “I’ve found out how overwhelming the media is and the way it drills things into your head, it’s almost like a mind control. If I could control prople’s minds, I’d like to put something useful in.”

— Natalie Merchant

13. “It’s really wonderful to be able to be nobody, and then have a moment when I can be somebody, and then go right back to being nobody again.”

— Natalie Merchant

14. “Life is sweet, life is also very short.”

— Natalie Merchant

15. “I’ve had a large gay following for many years and have been quite aware of that.”

— Natalie Merchant

16. “Literature gives us a window into other people’s experiences in other places, in other times, so I thought it would be really interesting to investigate how different people had written about motherhood, and childhood.”

— Natalie Merchant

17. “I would say I’d rather dig a ditch, you know, do hard, manual labor than write lyrics.”

— Natalie Merchant

18. “I wish I had appreciated my youth – I should have worn tighter clothing when I could have!”

— Natalie Merchant

19. “Have I been blind, have I been lost, inside myself and my own mind?”

— Natalie Merchant

20. “My mother was a single working mother; she started having children very young. There was a tension inside her about who she wanted to be and what she wanted to do and how she couldn’t achieve the things she wanted to.”

— Natalie Merchant

21. “It’s funny, I remember doing the Johnny Carson show, and, uh, I couldn’t afford my rent.”

— Natalie Merchant

22. “Im going to be shaking my booty when Im 55.”

— Natalie Merchant

23. “I think of myself as a musician and not a celebrity. Celebrity status is something you have to deliberately pursue – I couldn’t imagine myself seeking that.”

— Natalie Merchant

24. “Have I been wrong? Have I been wise to shut my eyes?”

— Natalie Merchant

25. “I don’t think women’s prisons are environments for dance routines, and I don’t think mass murder is humorous.”

— Natalie Merchant

26. “I’ve always considered it a great privilege to be a musician, I’ve never lost sight of that.”

— Natalie Merchant

27. “I don’t have a lot of thrilling anecdotes about my career or personal life. All the stuff that is interesting is private and I wouldn’t want people to know.”

— Natalie Merchant

28. “Bred for one purpose only, to die in man’s sport.”

— Natalie Merchant

29. “I don’t enjoy the work that I do. It’s just that it’s not self-sustaining anymore. The way that I like to make records – they’re expensive records to make and just can’t afford to do it anymore.”

— Natalie Merchant

30. “I think I have a really diverse audience. I’ve had people from all sorts of sexual persuasions.”

— Natalie Merchant

31. “The research phase was really fascinating – I’m not a closeted nerd, I’m an out-of-the-closet nerd.”

— Natalie Merchant

32. “TV holds a close second to cars for destroying our society. It’s a failed experiment.”

— Natalie Merchant

33. “And in the stockyard, beasts did climb their barriers.”

— Natalie Merchant

34. “When it came time to sequence the album, the new arrangements really demanded a different order. They were so different than they were before that the old sequence didn’t work anymore.”

— Natalie Merchant