Aretha Franklin

I’m the lady next door when I’m not on stage.

Don’t say Aretha is making a comeback, because I’ve never been away!

I’ve always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

I sing to the realists; people who accept it like it is.

Being a singer is a natural gift. It means I’m using to the highest degree possible the gift that God gave me to use. I’m happy with that.

If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me it’s good. But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is all about.

I hope you find a love. Your own designs of love.

My father, soft as rainclouds, my mother, hard as hail, prepared me to take the world by storm.

Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.

He’s out his head, I’m out my mind. We got that love, the crazy kind.

I’m only ever in two places – with you or on the way.

They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill, what never dies. Nor can Spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle; the Root and Record of their Friendship. If Absence be not death, neither is theirs. Death is but Crossing the World, as Friends do the Seas; They live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is Omnipresent. In this Divine Glass, they see Face to Face; and their Converse is Free, as well as Pure. This is the Comfort of Friends, that though they may be said to Die, yet their Friendship and Society are, in the best Sense, ever present, because Immortal.

It occurred to me that love, simply stated, is replacing the need to always be right with the need to be understanding.

Love is louder than the pressure to be perfect.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love? Can the child within my heart rise above? Can I sail through the changing ocean tides? Can I handle the seasons of my life?

You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise, we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

I’ve forever wanted a woman who loves like a soldier and fights like a poet. Always with unfailing faithfulness, always for the yearning in her heart.

Whoso loves, believes the impossible.