Rememberings Quotes

“But I think you’ll see in this book a girl who does find herself, not by success in the music industry but by taking the opportunity to sensibly and truly lose her marbles. The thing being that after losing them, one finds them and plays the game better.”
― Sinead O'Connor, Rememberings

“If I hope for anything as an artist, it’s that I inspire certain people to be who they really are. My audiences seem to be people who have been given a hard time for being who they are.”
― Sinead O'Connor, Rememberings

“In the church I felt really angry when all the people came to shake our hands. This was the morning before the day of the funeral. We were sitting in the front row. We’d never seen these people when she was alive. I was angry they hadn’t helped us. Or her. I didn’t know who half of them were. And the ones I knew made me feel angrier. They’d known. Not the details. But they’d known. And they hadn’t done a thing, but came now to shake our hands and tell us how sorry they were for our loss. I was tempted to ask, Which loss in particular? We’ve more chance of actually raising our mother from the dead some Easter Sunday than ever getting back what we really lost. Which is ourselves, years before now.”
― Sinead O'Connor, Rememberings

“When one lives with the Devil one finds out there's a God.”
― Sinead O'Connor, Rememberings

“there is no point setting out on a healing journey if you’re not going to find yourself healed.”
― Sinead O'Connor, Rememberings

“I just need to pay my yearly overheads, get shit off my chest, and not compromise or prostitute myself spiritually.”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“I don’t define success as having a good name or being wealthy. I define success by whether I keep the contract I made with the Holy Spirit”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“I have left some people out because I know they prefer privacy and others because I want them to be pissed when they look for their names in the book and don’t find them.”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“I would advise any young person not to do what I did. Time passes quickly and you can’t get it back.”
― Sinead O'Connor, Rememberings

“Why conduct a war and then say “Sorry” when someone is dead? I”
― Sinead O'Connor, Rememberings

“Joe plays guitar. He says he doesn’t play well, but he does. My sister plays harp and my younger brother plays drums. I always thought it would be brilliant to make one album together and call it Fuck the Corrs. But the fights would have made Liam and Noel Gallagher seem like pussycats.”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“Awards make some people feel more than and some people feel less than. And ... music shouldn’t be such a competition.”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“Similar to Christ’s, rap’s mission is self-esteem for those “previously deemed shit.” So it’s as dangerous as Christ’s. Because a lot of kids of all manner are listening, and no one in the industry wants their top floors threatened by either the wrong skin color or the wrong mindset—that is, anyone who cares about truth. Kids are the market, but you have to keep them believing they’re worth less than the stars or they won’t think they need what stars are selling. Wait till you see. When showbiz execs realize they can’t kill rap, they will hijack it. They’ll make millionaires of impostor rappers who say things like “You can’t be like me.”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“if you could talk about music you wouldn’t need music,”
― Sinead O'Connor, Rememberings

“I now share the bedsit with C., my friend who won the Halloween fancy dress last year although she hadn’t dressed up. She’s having an affair with the singer from the Fine Young Cannibals. Apparently he is fine and young and having her for breakfast, dinner, and tea.”
― Sinead O'Connor, Rememberings

“Secretly loving the food but also feeling that painful humiliation from childhood that comes when I register hunger. It’s too connected with my mother; I can’t accept it. Food turns to pebbles in my mouth, like Lot’s wife looking back. I resist it, as if to prove I’m totally in God’s hands.”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“they did an instrumental piece, played on a sort of high Irish whistle, that they said Finbar Furey, the lead singer, wrote when he was twelve. It was called “The Lonesome Boatman.” The most beautiful and haunting melody I’ve ever heard. Such grief to have come from a child. It was like he knew my own heart. And no one in this place had ever known my heart.”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“He’s a bit like someone who has been scalded and is running around looking for cool water to stand under. He can’t sit still. He’s addicted to working.”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“In real life you aren’t allowed to say you’re angry but in music you can say anything.”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“Top of the Pops. I love “54-46 Was My Number.” I love the reggae song “Israelites” too, and “Uptown Top Ranking.” I never heard any reggae except those three songs and I love them. I wish I knew what strictly roots from “Uptown Top Ranking” means. I heard the Impressions too; they have a song called “Fool for You,” about a man who loves a woman who is mean to him.”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“There’s someone in the music too, it’s not a person Its hands reach out for mine, it isn’t human It’s dark blue and green and made of space It wants to put its arms around my waist It wants to dance with me and whirl me by It seems to know me but I don’t know why”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“I won the prize in kindergarten for being able to curl up into the smallest ball, but my teacher never knew why I could do it so well.”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“I am an older woman now with a different voice. So this is only my first memoir. My intention is to live a long life and keep diaries this time so I won’t forget. However, it was necessary for me to let the child inside me speak because she needed to speak. And because I did, she is older now and chooses to remain about seventeen.”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“Making music is hard to write about. I was present then. In the place deep inside myself that only I know. But if you could talk about music you wouldn’t need music, so perhaps the things I talk about here are not always music.”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“Qui cantat, bis orat.”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“biggest”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“Just when it got to the highest note and you knew you were going to make an absolute show of yourself, he would throw an apple or a tennis ball at you and you’d be so busy trying to either defend yourself from the thing or catch it that the note would come out of your body. It was his way of showing you that you were just in your own way; it was the Stanislavski method of singing.”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“Jamaicans don’t do small talk. At first this is a bit uncomfortable because Irish people are always filling the gaps. I find myself in silence in fish-filled vans making deliveries, just like I did with my grandfather. I thought they didn’t like me was why they were silent. But it ain’t anything other than they are watchers. They’re watching out for God everywhere. They’re like God’s security detail. That’s how they see themselves, and that is exactly how they are.”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“Her job is to mind sad girls and she’s a sad girl herself.”
― Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings

“played on a sort of high Irish whistle, that they said Finbar Furey, the lead singer, wrote when he was twelve.”
― Sinead O'Connor, Rememberings