Top 19 Abigail Washburn Quotes

China was the first time I truly felt like an outsider. I fell in love with the process of trying to become intimate with the culture.

In China, I realized that if you visit often enough and learn the language, you will be assimilated, but you’ll still be kept at arm‘s length; you’ll always be looked on as a foreigner.

I’ve moved around so much my whole life, and I’ve gotten so used to being the Other in situations – the foreigner, the outsider. The first time I’ve ever felt like there was no separation between me and the other elements was in music.

I believe in the old, because it shows us where we come from – where our souls have risen from. And I believe in the new, because it gives us the opportunity to create who we are becoming.

I had no intention of becoming a performer, and yet under miraculous circumstances I was brought into the music industry fold. If divine powers hadn’t intervened, I’d still be living in China working in some area of Sino-American comparative law.

In some ways, in the U.S. we don’t know how to be. I think in a lot of ways America is about liberation and about change and progressive human relations. And because of that, I feel like that we’re confused about who we’re supposed to be and what it is that’s supposed to satisfy us and make us feel fulfilled.

I feel like my kind of music is a big pot of different spices. It’s a soup with all kinds of ingredients in it.

My whole drive is to make sure that music is a common space where we search for beauty and share it. It needs to be louder than any conversation. That’s where we have to go as a human race.

I’ve noticed that the more I open up, the more I learn.

I would say I’ve always lived creativity, but now I – I do it with an intention that’s got a completely different power.

I have a general sense of mission, and I intuitively know when something is influencing that mission. I think this is what I’m supposed to be doing. Doors keep opening. In the end, it’s the best use of my skills. I’ve finally consented to the idea that I’m an artist.

One thing I carried my whole life, especially from my grandparents in Chicago, was a huge idealism for the world.

I’m, I guess you could say, the Chinese-speaking, banjo-picking girl.

I do get around. Geographically, that is.

In some ways, my most comfortable feeling has been that of being an outsider coming in, but over the years I’ve tired of that and I’m ready to feel at home. That’s what music gives me: a feeling of absolute home.

I would still describe China as a vast, invigorating puzzle that will never make sense to my western upbringing.

My parents played the radio, but music was never an obsession or something that I thought I could call a career.

I do see music as complete refuge. It’s a universal home, complete common ground between everyone; it comes from a place that has no nation and no boundaries around it.

I feel like the one insight that’s extremely comforting to me about the world is that we all share the same pool of emotion that we draw from.