Talk:Billie Holiday

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Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable, precise and verifiable source for any quote on this list please move it to Billie Holiday. --Antiquary 19:19, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

• The difficult I’ll do right now. The impossible will take a little while.

• A kiss that is never tasted, is forever wasted.;

• Booby skins are for chums

• Don't threaten me with love, baby. Let's just go walking in the rain

• Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do anything better. All dope can do for you is kill you — and kill you the long, slow, hard way.

• I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That's all I know.

• I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was six years old.

• If I don't have friends, then I ain't nothing.

• If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all.

• If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling.

• In this country, don't forget, a habit is no damn private hell. There's no solitary confinement outside of jail. A habit is hell for those you love. And in this country, it's the worst kind of hell for those who love you.

• Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on.

• No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.

• Singing songs like "The Man I Love" or "Porgy" is no more work than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck, and I love roast duck.

• Sometimes it's worse to win a fight than to lose.
  • Quoted in Ron Backus' Fire Music: A Political History of Jazz. A slightly longer version continues, "Because if you win and the song comes out and it dies, the recording people hold that over your head for years and beat you out of having your way." --Hughh (talk) 18:52, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

• You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

• You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.

• You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave.
  • This appears to be from her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, but I can't see enough text on Google Books to verify it. However, Stacy Linn Holman Jones quotes readings by Gilbert Millstein narrating Holiday's recording [The Essential Billie Holiday Carnegie Hall Concert] in her (Jones') book Torch Singing as follows:
    

I've been told... nobody sings the word "hunger" like I do. Or the word "love." Maybe I [want to] remember what those words are all about.... All those towns from coast to coast where I got my lumps and my scars... every damn bit of it.... All I've learned in all those places from all those people is wrapped up in those two words. You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave. Everything I am and everything I want out of life goes smack back to that.... Who can tell what detours are ahead? Another trial? Sure. Another jail? Maybe. But if you've beat the habit again... no jail on earth can worry you too much. Tired? You bet. But all that I'll soon forget with my man.

--Hughh (talk) 18:27, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

• You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.
  • Source: Jazz Quotations

• I've been told that nobody sings the word 'hunger' like I do.
  • Source: Jazz Quotations
  • A collection on somebody's blog is not an adequate source.
  • See my comment above on "You've got to have something to eat..." with a quote from Lady Sings the Blues. --Hughh (talk) 18:27, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

• I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.
  • Source: Jazz Quotations

• I think I copied my style from Louis Armstrong. Because I used to like the big volume and the big sound that Bessie Smith got when she sang ... So I liked the feeling that Louis got and I wanted the big volume that Bessie Smith got. But I found that it didn't work with me, because I didn't have a big voice. So anyway between the two of them I sorta got Billie Holiday.
  • Source: Jazz Quotations

• You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave.
  • Source: Jazz Quotations
  • See my comment above on "You've got to have something to eat..." with a quote from Lady Sings the Blues. --Hughh (talk) 18:27, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

• You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling.
  • Source: Jazz Quotations

• They think they can make fuel from horse manure - now, I don't know if your car will be able to get 30 miles to the gallon, but it's sure gonna put a stop to siphoning.
  • Source: Jazz Quotations

• There's no damn business like show business - you have to smile to keep from throwing up.
  • Source: Jazz Quotations

• People don't understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it.
  • Source: Jazz Quotations

• Singing songs like 'The Man I Love' or 'Porgy' is no more work than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck, and I love roast duck.
  • Source: Jazz Quotations

• Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on.
  • Source: Jazz Quotations

• In this country, don't forget, a habit is no damn private hell. There's no solitary confinement outside of jail. A habit is hell for those you love. And in this country it's the worst kind of hell for those who love you.
  • Source: Jazz Quotations

• I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was six years old.
  • Source: Jazz Quotations

citation validity seems questionable

I am not sure that a high school newspaper *{{cite web|url=http://www.jameslogancourier.org/index.php?itemid=252|title=The James Logan Courier |accessdate=2006-05-15 |work=Billie Holiday}} should be used as a valid and verifiable source for a quote of Billie Halliday, unless of course she was at the school at the time (which seems rather unlikely). sDrewth 12:25, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

The high school journalism is largely copied from Wikipedia which, at the time, misattributed the quote to Holiday. The quote is associated with her because it appears in the song "Crazy He Calls Me" by Carl Sigman and Bob Russell, which she recorded in 1949. It was not original to that song: it is a minor variant of a U.S. military motto from WWII, identified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989, Library of Congress, ed. Suzy Platt, item 1183, p. 225) with attestations at least as early as 1943. ~ Ningauble 18:02, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Billie Holiday

Hello, I was thinking about Billie Holiday’s final Album The Last Recordings, it seems about 95% of people and reviews really attack this Album. I find it the most honest Album of them all, a sort of take me as I am, it’s all coming to an end Album, my respect for her is a lovely thing to match with this final recording. 88.108.10.72 15:30, 1 February 2023 (UTC)