Pieces of Me



"we danced in graveyards with vampires till dawn, we laughed in the faces of kings never afraid to burn ... and I hate ... I hate disintegration ... Oh, these little earthquakes ... Doesn't take much to rip us into pieces"


"Healing for me is being able to sit next to the butcher and say, 'Yes, I'm sitting next to the butcher now,' instead of saying 'There is no butcher. Well, there definitely is one!

On this record, I try to hold hands with violence. I'm holding hands with him and it's like 'Let's go get some dresses and hang out together.'"


"I found the secret to life .. I'm okay when everything is not okay ..."



"I go into a real vulnerable side of myself. That's where I am finding a lot of hidden stuff, as a woman afraid to be vulnerable, because I think I will be weak, thinking I'll be taken advantage of, thinking I won't know where to draw the line. But I am finding that vulnerability gives me great strength, because you're not hiding anymore!

Think about it; you walk into a room, and you really don't need to pretend to know something! It's OK I don't know this stuff! When you stop needing things from the people in the room, you walk in a room very differently. When you need people to think you know what you are talking about, you're already minus ten! . You're already sliding down that inner judgement scale! Because you're not looking at what you need the people in the room to understand. Well, I want them to think I am intelligent... NO! Let them think anything they want! 'Do you know, Tori? Do you know where you stand with yourself?,' It's really changing how you look outside of yourself."


"Under The Pink is a place, it's an internal place, It's the inner world, the inner life. You have to listen from your stomach. To me it's there. But you've got to be willing to put your moccasins on and walk down the road."


"Is it right butterfly, they like you better framed and dried?"


"I read the Alice Walker book, _Possessing the Secret of Joy_, and there's umm, in that book, the mothers take the daughters to the butchers to have their, let's say their genitalia removed. And even though it's a patriarchal culture that she's talking about, and that this custom was put into practice a long, long time ago by the patriarchy, it's the _mothers_ that take their daughters.

And, what I was singing about was, it's funny how from generation to generation women really betray each other in the ladies' room. There is a whole secret society that happens, and a lot of times a mother will say "I'm doing this for your good" whether it was binding the feet in the Eastern cultures or whether it's marrying your daughter to this gangrene, smelly-breathed, old, decrepit, rotting scumbag that's 80 years old with dough. "You know, this is really the best for you," when the truth is, it's the best for everybody else.

And, that's an extreme of women's relationships brought to just like, your girlfriend that you're hanging out with, but betrayal is betrayal, and I was thrown in to many situations as I was reading that book where girls, my girls, we were just dissin' each other. The things that we were doing, umm, it's like I would have never imagined that we could be so unsupportive of each other, and it was just happening while I was reading this book, and "Cornflake Girl" is the betrayal really of girls."


"people say to me: I can't believe you've made God a woman' and it's like, 'OK genius, leave the room, think for five minutes, go over your history, come back in the room and you tell me who has been the pope for the past few years.

You tell me who's been ruling institutional religion: males,patriarchy and a male God. The female Goddess who has been our role model has been the Virgin Mary, a sexless being. Now even though the Virgin Mary had kids later on, nobody wanted to talk about that when I was growing up, nobody wanted to talk about the Magdalene. Nobody wanted to talk about Mary's true role.

And people don't really think about how that affected an entire planet, to have the most populated religion worshipping a sexless being!"


"May I beg you one thing? No exclamation points. I've been getting them lately, so I'm afraid it's contagious. It's like the measles or something."


"You know how women always say men aren't emotionally available. Well, a lot of women aren't emotionally available. It's like, if you're vulnerable, we say, "Look, we need you to be sensitive." So you become sensitive, and yet we go, "You've got no fuckin' backbone," and we kick you in the face and run off with a ski trainer."


"Abuse is abuse and when you're terrorised you're terrorised and sometimes you cut out parts of your- self to survive. I tried to cut out parts of myself before he did and I didn't claim them back.

I also cut out parts of myself to survive the Christian upbringing, because it's easier if you numb those parts a lit- tle bit, put the ice on them. I don't know, it's your last little bit of power-that you do it before someone else does it.

So now what I've had to do is light up some matches and go be a little pyro, and warm up those parts again. "


"I had good memories of who I was before I was five, and then I became everybody else's idea of who I was."


I know I'm feeling good about myself because I don't need someone else to feel good about me. It's okay if they don't feel good about me.


"You know how some songs can have a party on their own, with a little book and a bottle of champagne?"


"All my writing springs from my religious suppression and this violence. I'm working through this violence."


"Very few people are willing to admit anything that in their mind is a weakness. So, I started being honest for 15 minutes a day and it was excruciating, how I really felt when I felt like I was strong and being clever, what I was really doing was being totally intimidated, trying to make another person feel bad about themselves, I mean, I would rationalize everything, you can justify anything, so that's how it started and then after the first six weeks of that fifteen minutes of honesty I was shocked to see what I was really thinking and really feeling, that means if you don't want to talk to your mother on the phone you say "I'm so sick of my mother calling me" or what ever it is.

No censorship! If you feel like you want to jump somebody's bones, I don't care how old they are, I don't care what sex they are, if you're turned on, you say, I had these feelings and you might be so horrified! But you must admit things to yourself because they don't necessarily mean what you think they mean. You have to start thinking and open up this tunnel and it's very scary because we suppress what we feel with such judgement and once I worked through that I would start asking questions but not at first, you don't question anything, not at first and I did this alone, so it was almost as if I was my own teacher, I was my own conscience."




Where are the visionaries? "Everybody is encouraged to listen to our dying leaders, dying meaning, their ideologies dying. Instead of running to Christianity or running to Islam, or running to... whomever, we have to move forward. You bring the truth, you glean it, like, you separate the pits from the fruit and you take with you what you've learned. We don't know how to think for ourselves, how to reason and this is what this generation needs to do is stand up and instead of PASSING THE SICKNESS TO OUR KIDS BECAUSE PLEASE TELL ME, WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN US AND OUR GREAT GRANDPARENTS? BECAUSE BELIEVE ME, WHEN WE'RE 50 YEARS OLD, THERE'S GONNA BE A YOUNG GENERATION GOING "THOSE FUCKING OLD FARTS, THEY'RE SO CLOSE MINDED!"


"So when we talk about religion and my unacceptance of the institution, it's because it MUST BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR IT'S ABUSE OF THE TRUTH! AND IT HAS ABUSED THE TRUTH! ALL OF THEM!"


This story for somebody might be, "Jesus, girl, get over it. There are real problems in life." Well, for me, that was my tragedy. A death of anybody close to me was nothing like that, because I had a part of me that was getting beaten in the corner; that expressive side was degraded, was forced to do things, was not loved. I'm a very cruel jailer. And I was.




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