Melody Gardot

Baby I’m a fool who thinks it’s cool to fall in love!

I learned to play guitar on my lying back while I was bed-ridden. I only thought to record the songs because sometimes I would I couldn’t remember what I had just done. Eventually I started singing, because I thought if I sang it that would help to remember even more. But I wasn’t trying to sing. And then one day-this is really weird -I just wrote a song. It came out at a rapid rate and I recorded it and I listened back to it and was like ‘Wow, it’s a tune’.

If today I can practice a sport, and move around 90% of the time without a cane, it’s because of the love and support of my producers, record labels and above all my audience who have always believed in me. Otherwise I wouldn’t have made much more progress than I did in the hospital.

When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after we’re dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.

For a long time I hated my body, because I was constantly suffering. But now I look at it like an old Mercedes with chrome bumpers. It costs a fortune to repair, it breaks down all the time, you can only use it once a week, the seat leather is starting to crack – but nonetheless it’s mine.

One of the problems of people who live with pain is that they spend the whole day thinking about it, and it’s exasperating. But even when I am having a bad moment and I can’t get myself together, I get on stage and for an hour or two the pain becomes super-small. It’s about controlling the mind, telling the pain to step aside. Music does that. It’s the most fantastic drug in the world.

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.

The essence of Buddhism is, if you can, to help others. If not, then at least refrain from hurting others.

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

I’m essentially agnostic. I don’t have a problem with God. I have a problem with religion. I’ve chosen to live my life without the certainties of religious faith. I think they’re dangerous. Music is something that gives my life value and spiritual solace.

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

To a brave man, good and bad luck are like his left and right hand. He uses both.

Perhaps the most spiritual thing any of us can do is simply to look through our own eyes, see with the eyes of wholeness, and act with integrity and kindness.

Children, Fear God; that is to say, have an holy awe upon your minds to avoid that which is evil, and a strict care to embrace and do that which is good.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.

O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought.

Not only higher forms of life but also many of the smallest insects are social beings who, without any religion, law or education, survive by mutual cooperation based on an innate recognition of their interconnectedness.

Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.