Sufjan Stevens Quotes

All the time we spent in bed, counting miles before we said, fall in love and fall apart, things will end before they start.

A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the Modifier's Madness. A lot of adjectives working overtime.

I love kissing. If I could kiss all day, I would. I can’t stop thinking about kissing. I like kissing more than sex because there’s no end to it. You can kiss forever. You can kiss yourself into oblivion. You can kiss all over the body. You can kiss yourself to sleep. And when you wake up, you can’t stop thinking about kissing. Dammit, I can’t get anything done because I’m so busy thinking about kissing. Kissing is madness! But it’s absolute paradise, if you can find a good kisser.

Love is unconditional and incomprehensible. And I believe it's possible to love absent of mutual respect.

Everyone suffers; life is pain; and death is the final punctuation at the end of that sentence, so deal with it. I really think you can manage pain and suffering by living in fullness and being true to yourself and all those seemingly vapid platitudes.

Perhaps we have failed as human beings. Perhaps we have embarrassed ourselves to the natural world. We have been rigorous and willful in all the wrong ways. But it doesn't have to be this way. Maybe you don't want to deal with (marching), the permanent marker and poster board. But try something else. Carry someone's groceries. Chat with the custodian in your office building. Donate blood. Live in Rwanda for a year. Write letters to the Department of Buildings. Learn to knit. It is only going to get better from here on out.

I like residing in abstraction.

I'm a very self-conscious person, I think we all are, but I'm especially not very comfortable in my body. I always feel really weird and awkward on the street or on the stage. It has nothing to do with circumstances, it's just an ongoing psychological state, like white noise.

I'm terrified of just being myself because I think it's boring. I know who I really am and I think it's boring.

There is nothing more incredible and moving and appealing than good music, and it cannot always be reduced to a story, to exposition. It's so much more abstract and brilliant.

When I live, I'll give it all I've got.

Art is... a reflection of a greater divine creation. There really is no separation.

I quickly learned that you don't have to be incarcerated by suffering, and that, in spite of the dysfunctional nature of your family, you are an individual in full possession of your life.

I'm being explicit about really horrifying experiences in my life, but my hope has always been to be responsible as an artist and to avoid indulging in my misery, or to come off as an exhibitionist. I don't want to make the listener complicit in my vulnerable prose poem of depression, I just want to honor the experience. I'm not the victim here, and I'm not seeking other peoples' sympathy. I don't blame my parents, they did the best they could.

My music is just about story telling. I don't have much to say, and I'm not trying to change anyone's mind. I'm just singing through conviction about what I love and what I care about, starting with the very small.

I’ve never known a man who loved me.

It's traumatic to meditate on the availability of information through the Internet, or the way we perceive the world as a result. People don't experience things totally or viscerally anymore. It's all through representation, be it a record on YouTube or a post on a blog.

The Internet is manic. It's very strange. I don't think it's healthy. They should outlaw posting comments! It's a bummer to go somewhere to get information or buy tickets and you encounter profanity everywhere you go.

Yes, the kingdom of Christianity and the Church has been one of the most destructive forces in history, and there are levels of bastardization of religious beliefs. But the unique thing about Christianity is that it is so amorphous and not reductive to culture or place or anything. It's extremely malleable.

My siblings and I were raised like tenants, to be honest. There was a total absence of intimacy in my family, though there was still a great deal of camaraderie among the kids. Things were set up almost like a business, and it had to be managed that way because we were really poor, and there were a lot of mouths to feed.

I've always been a visual person, I'm formerly a graphic designer. I've always seen myself as an observer. I like to maintain objectivity and don't get too intimately involved in my subjects.

I still describe myself as a Christian, and my love of God and my relationship with God is fundamental, but its manifestations in my life and the practices of it are constantly changing. I find incredible freedom in my faith.

I'm not beholden to the public, and neither are the public beholden to me or my songs. I'm very much of a populist on those terms, I believe that the song is no longer mine anyway. I like to process the dispossession that happens when you play something live. I don't have a clue as to how these songs are going to plan out, whether they're going to be on a record. I don't know yet.

The Internet is just one big gossip chamber - that's why it's so fascinating and entertaining. It's a fabulous platform for superficial communication.

We live in a world that is cruel to the earth itself. Man is a biological terrorist.