Tracy Chapman Quotes

Black is like a broken vessel, which is deprived of the capacity to contain anything.

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

I have never felt bereft of anything.

We can't feel anything - all that's left inside us is dust.

There used to be this real sense of community integrity in rock. It has really eroded. Everyone seems to be on their own now.

The nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

I cannot write if there is a sense of plenitude. I have to hypothesize that there is a loss.

Take away our things, and something in us dies.

I know what it is to have nothing.

There is a real danger of the United Kingdom breaking up. There is a loss of common identity.

I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.

Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb/I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from/Don't even hear a murmur of a prayer/It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.

The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.

The numbness of his loss had passed, and the pain would hit me out of nowhere, doubling me over, racking my body with sobs. Where are you? I would cry out in my mind. Where have you gone? Of course, there was never any answer.

Take my friends and my home - as an outcast I'll roam: Take the money I have in the bank: It is just what I wish, but deprive me of fish, And my life would indeed be blank.

Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

When one thing takes another away, what do we call that?” she asked my class. “Homicide!” I called out

The music left only this bad hurt in her, and a blankness. She could not remember any of the symphony, not even the last few notes. She tried to remember, but no sound at all came to her. Now that it was over there was only her heart like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.

the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.

One day you're there and then all of a sudden, there's less of you. And you wonder where that part went. If it's living somewhere outside of you. And you keep thinking maybe you'll get it back. And then you realize it's just gone.

In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.

I wonder if I shall ever see her again, and I realize that I scarcely care. I can feel the sheets beneath me, and the cold air on my chest. I feel fine. I feel absolutely fine. I feel nothing at all.

I'm missing something when I'm sleeping.

Two separate, distinct personalities, not separate at all, but inextricably bound, soul and body and mind, to each other, how did we get so far apart so fast?