Billie Holiday Quotes

Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what's more than enough.

The difficult I'll do right now. The impossible will take a little while.

If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

When you sing, always tell the truth.

If nobody can learn from the past, then there's no point in raking it up.

The whole basis of my singing is feeling. Unless I feel something, I can't sing.

God has blessed you when he lets you believe in somebody.

I don't think I ever sing the same way twice. The blues is sort of a mixed-up thing. You just have to feel it. Anything I do sing is part of my life.

Don't threaten me with love, baby. Let's just go walking in the rain.

If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all.

Don't be in such a hurry.

I don't think I'm singing. I feel like I'm playing a horn...What comes out is what I feel.

Sometimes it's worse to win a fight than to lose.

I'm always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I've been.

Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do anything better. All dope can do for you is kill you - and kill you the long, slow, hard way.

You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave.

A kiss that is never tasted, is forever and ever wasted.

People don't understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it.

I can only sing songs my way. I don't know any other way.

I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own.

I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.

Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on.

Them that's got shall get, Them that's not shall lose. So the Bible says, And it still is news. Mama may have, Papa may have, But God bless the child that's got his own.

Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three.