Joni Mitchell Quotes

I am really puzzled to understand myself.

Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

Sometimes I feel like I'm in a dream world, because it doesn't always seem too logical how things work out.

My life was a mystery even as I lived it.

The one recurring theme in my writing, and in my life in general, is confusion. The fact that anytime you think you really know something, you're going to find out you're wrong - that is the rule. The moments where you think you have something figured out, those are the exceptions.

There are many things that I don't understand.

I can't remember any dreams in my life. There's so much strange in real life that it often seems like a dream.

There can be an easy way to interpret things some times and it seems like maybe I'm on the wrong side of those interpretations a lot of those times.

September could see it. She did not know what is was she saw. That is the disadvantage of being a heroine, rather than a narrator. She knew only that a red light glowed and went dark, glowed and went dark.

Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix.

After that, she wasn't sure what the game was or if she'd imagined it. All she knew was that she had lost.

What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?

Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know.

For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.

[William Butler] Yeats has the phrase Hodos Chameliontos, chameleon-like, in that you don't know where the beginning or the middle or the end is, so it's an unrelieved hallucination, because you don't know where you're coming in and you don't know where you're going out. It ends, you're going into the hallucination, or maybe coming out of it, I don't know.

The more I see, the less I know.

Men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat - seamy on both sides.

A sage steers by the bright light of confusion and doubt.

Oft from new truths, and new phrase, new doubts grow, As strange attire aliens the men we know.

Who can really distinguish between the sea and what's reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?

So much of life is paradox. So much of life is neither one thing nor the other... it's both things at the same time.

I asked the Zebra, are you black with white stripes? Or white with black stripes? And the zebra asked me, Are you good with bad habits? Or are you bad with good habits? Are you noisy with quiet times? Or are you quiet with noisy times? Are you happy with some sad days? Or are you sad with some happy days? Are you neat with some sloppy ways? Or are you sloppy with some neat ways? And on and on and on and on and on and on he went. I’ll never ask a zebra about stripes...again.

Perhaps, on the whole, embarrassment and perplexity are a kind of natural accompaniment to life and movement; and it is better to be driven out of your senses with thinking which of two things you ought to do than to do nothing whatever, and be utterly uninteresting to all the world.

It is a matter of perspective, the difference between opponent and partner," Tsukiko says. "You step to the side and the same person can be either or both or something else entirely. It is difficult to know which face is true.