The Woman In Me Quotes
"In the Bible it says your tongue is your sword."
"Singing is magic. When I sing, I own who I am."
"All I wanted was to be taken away from the everyday world and into that realm where I could express myself without thinking."
"Artists make things and play characters because they want an escape into faraway worlds."
"The first time I was truly touched and got shivers down my spine was hearing our housekeeper singing in the laundry room."
"The way people talk about men like June in the South is to say 'Nothing was good enough for him,' that he was 'a perfectionist,' that he was 'a very involved father.'"
"My dad could also be abusive with my mom, but he was more the type of drinker who would go away for days at a time."
"When I sang, it came out gravelly in a way that sounded more mature and sexier."
"There is so much freedom in being anonymous."
"For me, performing wasn’t about posing and smiling. Onstage, I was like a basketball player driving down the court. I had ball sense, street sense. I was fearless."
"I just gotta be me. I know there are going to be people out there—I know not everyone’s gonna like me."
"I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb. And I also know that I’m not blonde."
"Did I kill someone?" "You got married!" they said, as if that might be somehow worse.
"When you’re successful at something, there’s a lot of pressure to keep right on doing it, even if you’re not enjoying it anymore."
"We want to feel safe and alive and sexy all at the same time."
"The thought of going out and being brave onstage or at clubs, even at parties or dinners, filled me with fear."
"The poet Rumi says the wound is the place where the light enters you. I have always believed that."
"As a twentysomething will do after a few drinks, I wound up in bed with one of my old friends—a childhood friend who I’d known forever."
"You have to speak the thing that you’re feeling, even if it scares you. You have to tell your story. You have to raise your voice."
"I hated that entire stupid tour—so much that I prayed every night. I said, "God, just make my arm break. Make my leg break. Can you make something break?""
"I just went to my apartment in Manhattan, got into my princess bed, and if anyone—friends, family, people in the business—wanted to talk to me during this time, I said, "Leave me alone."
"With this newly found freedom, it’s like people don’t know how to act around me."
"It’s true what they say—when you have a baby, no one can prepare you."
"I can see now that you have to be smart enough, vicious enough, deliberate enough to play the game, and I did not know the game."
"Everything everyone says about becoming a parent was true for me. My boys gave my life meaning."
"It felt like my father and Lou’s employee Robin Greenhill ruled my life and monitored every move I made."
"When I made the wrong move, it was like my mother wasn’t concerned. She would share my every mistake on television, promoting her book."
"I would fall to my knees. I would do anything I could to help him through it, to hold him, to make it better."
"Pretty quickly, I called the weird-ass lawyer the court had appointed for me and asked him for help."
"And here’s the sad, honest truth: after everything I had been through, I didn’t have a lot of fight left in me."
"Feeling like you’re never good enough is a soul-crushing state of being for a child."
"I became a robot. But not just a robot—a sort of child-robot."
"They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time."
"My freedom in exchange for naps with my children—it was a trade I was willing to make."
"I found a human connection in those meetings that I’d never found anywhere before in my life."
"It speaks volumes when you demand respect. It changes everything."
"I knew how to carry myself. I’d become strong, enduring that kind of schedule."
"It was such a waste. And as a performer who had always taken so much pride in her musicianship, I can’t stress enough how mad I was that they wouldn’t even let me change up my show."
"I watch scary movies. I’ve seen The Conjuring. I’m not scared of anything after those months at that treatment center."
"God must have been with me through that period of time. Three months into my confinement, I started to believe that my little heart, whatever made me Britney, was no longer inside my body anymore. Something bigger must have been carrying me through, because it was too much for me to bear alone."
"What do we have except our connections to one another? And what stronger bond is there than music?"
"I don't think people knew how much the #FreeBritney movement meant to me, especially in the beginning. Toward the end, when the court hearings were going on, seeing people advocating for me meant a whole lot. But when it first happened, that got my heart, because I was not okay, not at all."
"You can't fuck with a woman who knows how to pray. Really pray. All I did was pray."
"Being controlled made me so angry on behalf of anyone who doesn’t have the right to determine their own fate."
"I’ve been through a lot. The reason why I’m alive today is because I know joy."
"For me, it's all about love—unconditional love."
"Freedom means being able to make mistakes, and learning from them. Freedom means I don’t have to perform for anyone—onstage or offstage. Freedom means that I get to be as beautifully imperfect as everyone else."