Rememberings

by Sinéad O'Connor

She isn’t violent at all; she’s a canary in a tiger suit.

We didn’t get set an example of blood being thicker than water. I’m sure in our veins there’s not blood, but water.

We really are a very messed-up family. We don’t even suit that word, family. It should be a comforting word. But it’s not. It’s a painful, stabbing word. Cuts the heart into pieces. And all the more because it’s too late to go back and do anything differently.

I’m lonely but I’m writing songs for my first album, and songs are a lonely person’s occupation; songs are ghosts. When my album comes out I’ll become a traveling “ghost delivery woman.” There’ll be a lifetime of goodbyes. I can’t have a problem with that.

He is cosmetic surgeon to the stars.

There’s a very good reason that God made the word touring rhyme with the word whoring.

He was fun, the kind of person who would make you not want to wander home.

My intention had always been to destroy my mother’s photo of the pope. It represented lies and liars and abuse. The type of people who kept these things were devils like my mother. I never knew when or where or how I would destroy it, but destroy it I would when the right moment came. And with that in mind, I carefully brought it everywhere I lived from that day forward. Because nobody ever gave a shit about the children of Ireland.

Everyone wants a pop star, see? But I am a protest singer. I just had stuff to get off my chest. I had no desire for fame. In fact, that’s why I chose the first song. “Success” was making a failure of my life. Because everyone was already calling me crazy for not acting like a pop star. For not worshipping fame. And I understand I’ve torn up the dreams of those around me. But those aren’t my dreams. No one ever asked me what my dreams were; they just got mad at me for not being who they wanted me to be.

fire looks like it’s made of maggots when you’re on acid. It’s the weirdest thing. Makes me wonder if everything is secretly made of maggots.

My father, who was in the audience that night, advises me afterward that it might be time for me to reconsider college because I just destroyed my career. He’s right. But I don’t care. Some things are worth losing your career for. And I don’t want a pop-star career anymore anyway because nobody knows me and I’m so lonely.

After all, there is no point setting out on a healing journey if you’re not going to find yourself healed.

It’s an interesting kind of journey, looking for romance, looking for love, falling in love, getting what you want, then finding out you want to run a million miles away.

He’s genuinely upset that he doesn’t have a superpower. Although I’m always telling him he does, in fact, have a superpower: his large empathetic heart and the amount of love he has for people. Of course, he scoffs at me, saying, “You can’t save the universe with a large empathetic heart.” I disagree.

If I have no other purpose in this life other than to put these four children on this earth, well, that’s enough for me to feel I did something useful in this world.

I’ve done only one holy thing in my life and that was sing. Only the business of music is so unholy.

The people are to blame. If Trump were an Irish president or prime minister, he’d have been physically ripped out of office the day he first gave away someone’s child at any border.

Because of the virus, it feels like the end of the world and the beginning of another. Maybe a better one.