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" Soldiers are trained not to be vulnerable, but when they come home, they've got to learn it. "

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" In a lot of ways, songwriting helped save my life. "

" I felt my whole life like I didn't have a family, and I needed one. So I had to build one, and you build one with faith, hope, and the healing power of love - or you end up the 'Unabomber.' That's the choice. "

" A lot of songwriters have written about soldiers and war, but very few have written with them. "

" I'm an old-fashioned folk singer. I stand in front of an audience with a guitar and a barstool. "

" I'm a traveler and a vagabond and an observer, and the songs come through that. And that's just the way it's going to be. "

" I don't know who my dad is. "

" I keep seeing the headline on articles that says something like 'Mary Gauthier Helping Our Veterans.' It's troubling - and it's condescending. Whatever I'm doing as a songwriter to help them tell their stories, they're giving it back to me double, triple, quadruple. "

" If somebody in a family is in service, the whole family is in service. I didn't know that. I didn't know our veterans were being deployed seven, eight, nine, 10 times. It's inhumane. "

" What I've found at 48 years old is that there's nothing about me that's unique. "

" War is hell. Sending young people to conflicts that are unwinnable and unresolvable - it puts them in a position where they're going to suffer. And yet their experience is that they're proud of their service, and they should be. Service freely rendered is a noble thing. "

" I always knew I was going to make a record called 'The Foundling.' Since I picked up a guitar, I knew it. "

" Creating something beautiful out of pain helps ease the pain. So, that's kind of how I got to songwriting - quite honestly out of desperation. "

" I have such a good life. It's something I couldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams. "

" I think we're very much in a mystery here in this life and that artists try to pierce the mystery with their art. "

" I got sober at 27 and started writing around 30 and started playing music in public around 32, 33. "

" I think if people really listened to what our families who serve go through, we could have a realistic discussion of what it means to send young people to war. "

" I did not know that if a member of a family serves, the whole family serves. I did not know that the spouses of our service members carry such a heavy load. "

" I try not to eat cakes, but sugar screams my name. "

" Melody's like tweezers that go into the infection and pull out the wounded part. You can almost not stay silent in the face of a melody that matches your emotion. You feel seen. "

" There's such a thing as a tribe - and family of choice. "

" Recovery stabilized me; songwriting gave me a purpose. "

" My experience is that the universal is the personal. If you can get past your navel-gazing into the deepest part of yourself as a writer, you find everyone - we're all there. "

" I think each veteran's soul has something that it needs to say. I know from my own personal traumas, it's very hard to know what that is. But when I'm watching someone else struggle, it's not as confusing for me, 'cause it's not my struggle, so I can help identify that. "

" I think it's a stereotype that soldiers don't talk, because my experience is that they will talk if they are met with empathy and no judgment. "

" I would make a terrible soldier, because I don't follow orders. "

" When I became a songwriter, it was out of some sort of desperation. I needed to create something. I had to latch on to something, and the guitar was what I grabbed. "

" I spent my 18th birthday in jail. Charges were dropped as long as I promised never to return to the state of Kansas. My parents took me home to Louisiana. I lasted there a week. Then I ran away. "

" There's a universal inside of me. So if I tell my story, you're going to see parts of your story in it. I don't know which parts, but we all overlap. We're all very much alike. "

" I got interviewed by one writer who started with the line, 'Mary Gauthier is a woman who clearly doesn't care how she looks.' I do too. It's just that I'm not very good at it. "

" I think Bob Dylan showed us that songs can rise to the level of literature, and he proved it over and over again. That's why they keep trying to get him a Nobel Prize for literature: because there is no Nobel Prize for songwriting. "