Al Jarreau Quotes

I want my tattoos to be a story of my life.

I love wearing things that come with a story.

My mother is French-Italian with a little Spanish blood in her. I've been raised, and she was, as far as I know, raised as a Christian.

My own sense of family, where I came from and what I made for myself is an important part of my life.

I'm from a nice, suburban, middle-class family, but my tattoos remind me where I've been.

One curious thing about growing up is that you don't only move forward in time; you move backwards as well, as pieces of your parents' and grandparents' lives come to you.

Some of what I am doing when I am researching is looking for things people in my family have done and finding out what those things mean, why they did those things and seeing how I fit into them.

My music is an extension of who I am and what I went through and what I know musically.

In many ways, each of us is the sum total of what our ancestors were. The virtues they had may be our virtues, their strengths our strengths, and, in a way, their challenges could be our challenges.

My life is mine to remember.

I remember a specific moment, watching my grandmother hang the clothes on the line, and her saying to me, 'you are going to have to learn to do this,' and me being in that space of awareness and knowing that my life would not be the same as my grandmother's life.

My background is inseparable from my work.

Everybody's past and history informs them.

We all grow up with inherited genes and inherited sensibilities, and they run very, very deep.

I'm not interested in someone's credits. Let me see who you are, and tell me a story of your life.

Wouldn't you say that most of us are a reflection of or a reaction to the people who have been closest to us? I'm a reflection of my grandmother.

There's a line that runs between everyone and their ancestors, and you cannot sever that. Maybe disassociate from those ideas but not how you are connected to them. But, you can realise how you've benefited and change how you raise your kids.

Varavelpu' has a special place in my heart because it was inspired from my own father's experiences.

I am a product of my father's work.

My movies are personal notes of my whole life.

All the scars on my body, all the bumps and bruises, all the muscles - that is a story of everything I have done. And it's not just my story. My ancestors who came before me gave me this vessel to sculpt and mold.

The idea that all we have is everything that's come before us, and we are the accumulated weight of our own personal histories, is a beautiful concept. And yet it also leaves you asking, 'Is that all there is? Is that all that defines us? Is that all we have?'

Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography.

Well, I didn't feel that I could do justice to this story of my parents and their generation, and all that they did to make it possible for me to be who I am, if I sort of just put it at the beginning of a book about my last eight years in foreign policy.

I am not a historian. I happen to think that the content of my mother's life - her myths, her superstitions, her prayers, the contents of her pantry, the smell of her kitchen, the song that escaped from her sometimes parched lips, her thoughtful repose and pregnant laughter - are all worthy of art.