Billie Holiday Quotes

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.

I joined Count Basie’s band to make a little money and see the world. For almost two years I didn’t see anything but the inside of a Blue Goose bus, and I never got to send home a quarter.

If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you’re out of your mind. There are more kicks to be had in a good case of paralytic polio or by living in an iron lung. If you think you need stuff to play music or sing, you’re crazy. It can fix you so you […]

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

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

No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music, or it isn’t music.

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

In this country, don’t forget, a habit is no damn private hell. There’s no solitary confinement outside of jail. A habit is hell for those you love. And in this country it’s the worst kind of hell for those who love you.

Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married… Mom was working as a maid with a white family. When they found out she was going to have a baby they just threw her out. Pop’s family just about had a fit, too, when they heard about it. They were real […]

They think they can make fuel from horse manure – Now, I don’t know if your car will be able to get 30 miles to the gallon, but it’s sure gonna put a stop to siphoning.