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" The belief when your mother gives you away is that there's something deeply wrong. Mothers don't give babies away. There's something wrong with me, something unlovable, something seriously flawed in me. It's a fundamental thing; it's precognitive. You feel it rather than think it. How could you not? "

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" 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. "

Mary Gauthier

Find

You

Yourself

" When I first got sober, I hadn't read anything for six or seven years. I didn't have even that much focus. "

" It can take me many months to write one of my own songs. "

" I got issues. Boy, have I got issues. "

" I write to make some sense of things that confuse me. The mechanics of my own heart are the most confusing I know about - and don't know about - and other people's are a bit confusing, too. "

Mary Gauthier

Heart

Know

" 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. "

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

Mary Gauthier

Because

Terrible

" Music had always been a kind of anchor for me. But I didn't write my first song till I was 35. "

" What I'm finding is there's an awful lot about adoption and relinquishment and the complicated nature of family that we, as human beings, haven't been able to have a real discussion about yet without a lot of censorship. "

" I think I'll always draw from being a person that doesn't know how to have a normal life, whatever a normal life is. "

" Songs bring us into connection with each other. When they resonate, when we're in resonance, singing together, we become one for that 3 1/2 or four minutes the song lasts. It takes away that isolated loneliness that modern life is so full of. "

Mary Gauthier

Together

Life

" I have got my story. Adoptees rarely get our stories. We only know what we are told. I don't even have my story, really. My mother won't tell me. She won't tell me who my father is. She won't tell me the story of my birth. "

" A song is an emotional lightning bolt - a good one, anyway. "

" 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. "

" If I start tracing, I bet I will find a writer in my family tree. "

" 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, because of the kind of writer I am, I can't do it halfway. I can't do it without dedicating my entire life to it. I have to give it a hundred percent. "

" I've come to terms with the fact that I'll probably be in therapy all of my life. "

" What matters is what happens in the soul of an artist when you're playing. "

" I don't play everything I write. I mean, everything I write is not that good. I bring out into the world the ones I think that are really worthy of an audience's attention. "

" I've always been drawn to the hard story, the trauma, because I think art can turn it around. "

" It is a form of arrogance to assume that other people are even thinking about you. "

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

" By the time I got to songwriting, I had been faced with a lot of troubles as a result of my own collective of trauma. I was someone who instinctively figured out that writing songs about the struggle helps you with the struggle. "

" 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. "

" People in Ireland take in the whole song. After a long history of great singers and songwriters and poets, they are able to consume the entire song - not just the external; they go inside. "

" There's an ocean of misunderstanding. It's called the civilian-military divide. I had a lot to learn about our military - who they are, what burdens they carry. "

" Fundamentally, our job as songwriters is to sit down and listen. "

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

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