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Janis knew more than I did about "how it was", but she lacked enough armor for the inevitable hassles. She was open and spontaneous enough to get her heart trampled with a regularity that took me thirty years to experience or understand. On the various occasions when we were together, she seemed to be holding in something she thought I might not want to hear, like older people do when they hear kids they love saying with absolute youthful confidence, "Oh, that'll never happen to me." Sometimes you know you can't tell them how it is, they have to find out for themselves. Janis felt like an old soul, a wisecracking grandmother whom everybody loved to visit. When I was with her, I often felt like a part of her distant family, a young upstart relative who was still too full of her own sophistry to hear wisdom.
Did we compliment each other? Yes, but not often enough.
--
Grace Slick, in Somebody to Love? : A Rock-and-Roll Memoir (1998) by Grace Slick and Andrea Cagan

 

Janis Joplin

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One relative felt that the story of my grandmother should not have been revealed. My grandmother was the woman (in The Kitchen God's Wife) who had been raped, forced to be a concubine, and finally killed herself. My mother, though, got equally angry at the relative and said, "For so many years, I carried this shame on my back, and my mother suffered, because she couldn't say anything to anybody." And she said, "It's not too late; tell the world, tell the world what happened to her." And I take her mandate to be the one that is in my heart, the one that I should follow.

 

Amy Tan

 

It's only when you become love — in other words, when you have dropped your illusions and attachments — that you will "know." As you identify less and less with the "me," you will be more at ease with everybody and with everything. Do you know why? Because you are no longer afraid of being hurt or not liked. You no longer desire to impress anyone. Can you imagine the relief when you don't have to impress anybody anymore? Oh, what a relief. Happiness at last! You no longer feel the need or the compulsion to explain things anymore. It's all right. What is there to be explained? And you don't feel the need or compulsion to apologize anymore. I'd much rather hear you say, "I've come awake," than hear you say, "I'm sorry." I'd much rather hear you say to me, "I've come awake since we last met; what I did to you won't happen again," than to hear you say, "I'm so sorry for what I did to you."

 

Anthony de Mello

 

I didn't just start doing this today. Not like some people that have a movie coming out, so they go visit kids in the hospital. You don't need that phony crap. All of these celebrities, they turn my stomach with their funny stuff. I've been going in the ghettos without the press, without bodyguards, talking to kids. "Get to reading, stay in school. You don't have to carry a gun." I know about peer pressure and all that, but I say, "Hey, they called me a sissy because I wouldn't join a gang. Who was calling me a sissy? Does it make me a sissy because somebody called me a sissy?" [...] I'm going to fight if you touch me or hurt me or do harm to my family. But if you call me a bad name, or whatnot, I'm too smart for that. That's the message the kids need to hear coming from me. I tell them, "If I fought every time somebody called me a name, I would never get out of jail. But I'm disciplined. I'm smarter than that." So I tell them, like my mother said, "Consider the source." When you see who called you the name, then you understand why they're doing it. Then you don't have to stoop that low.

 

Mr. T

 

She said to her, "Grandmother, what great arms you have!"
"That's to embrace you the better, my child."
"Grandmother, what great legs you have!"
"That's to run the better, my child."
"Grandmother, what great ears you have!"
"That's to hear the better, my child."
"Grandmother, what great teeth you have!"
"That's for to eat you."
And upon saying these words, this naughty Wolf threw himself upon Little Red Riding Hood, and ate her.

 

Charles Perrault