Piaf Quotes & Sayings

I tap my pen against the Edith Piaf record, thinking of how to express my future sentiments when my journey comes to an end. Either in the arms of the girl I love, or buried in a box of memories, this note will be the last.
'Ma femme,
Je ne regrette rien, because I found everything.
I love you. — Ashley Pullo

Death is the beginning of something. — Edith Piaf

Cheap music, childish images, the vulgate in language, in its crassest sense, can penetrate to the deeps of our necessities and dreams. It can assert irrevocable tenure there. The opening bars, the hammer-beat accelerando of Edith Piaf's Je ne regrette rien - the text is infantile, the tune stentorian, and the politics which enlisted the song unattractive - tempt every nerve in me, touch the bone with a cold burn and draw me into God knows what infidelities to reason, each time I hear the song, and hear it, uncalled for, recurrent inside me. — George Steiner

If God has allowed me to earn so much money, it is because He knows I give it all away. — Edith Piaf

When I was very little, I was into Michael Jackson. At six or seven, it was Madonna, but she's not what she used to be. I've been into everything from Edith Piaf to Joe Strummer to the Velvet Underground to Suicide to A Tribe Called Quest to African music. — Lykke Li

When he takes me in his arms, and speaks to me softly, I see the world through rose-colored glasses. — Edith Piaf

Singing is a way of escaping. It's another world. I'm no longer on earth. — Edith Piaf

'Piaf' I did it because I wanted to do more theater instead of only musicals, and someone gave me the book and said to me, 'You have to do it.' — Elena Roger

I love to sing old Motown songs to myself, or some Patti Smith Edith Piaf or Billie Holiday. That gets me in the mood for singing. — Siobhan Fahey

I'll serve something black. Bean soup, licorice, coffee. It'll be very grim, I promise. We'll cover the mirrors. We'll listen to Piaf. We'll read passages from Dostoyevsky. — Stephanie Kallos

I'll never approach a part in the same way again. Piaf taught me so much. In terms of my work, I think I'll enjoy it even more than before, because now I know that characters truly exist in their own right. I'll have a way to bring them even more intensely to life. — Marion Cotillard

To be successful in my native France, where people speak the same language and understand me, is nothing. — Edith Piaf

I'm the only one who still believes in Santa Claus! — Edith Piaf

France is going to endure, and I'll tell you [ISIS people who attacked Paris ] why. If you're in a war of culture and lifestyle with France, good fucking luck, because go ahead, bring your bankrupt ideology. They'll bring Jean-Paul Sartre, Edith Piaf, fine wine, Camus, Camembert, madeleines, macarons, Marcel Proust and the fucking croquembouche. You just brought a philosophy of rigorous self-abnegation to a pastry fight, my friend. You are fucked. — John Oliver

I can die now. I've lived twice. — Edith Piaf

Tell me what you'd like to hear me sing. I'll sing whatever you like, after which I'll take up a collection, if you don't mind. — Edith Piaf

To sing is to bring to life; impossible if the words are mediocre, however good the music. — Edith Piaf

I've always wanted to sing, just as I've always known that one day I would have my own niche in the annals of song. It was a feeling I had. — Edith Piaf

I want to die young. I think it's awful to get old, and sickness is ugly ... — Edith Piaf

I always thought my days spent in darkness [as a child she had cataracts and was unable to see for nearly four years] gave me a very special sensitivity. Much later, when I really wanted to hear, really 'see' a song, I'd close my eyes, and when I wanted to bring it out of the very depths of myself, out of my guts, out of my belly, when the song had to come from far away, I'd close my eyes. — Edith Piaf

American journalist: If you were to give advice to a woman, what would it be?
Edith Piaf: Love.
American journalist: To a young girl?
Edith Piaf: Love.
American journalist: To a child?
Edith Piaf: Love. — Edith Piaf

Every damn fool thing you do in this life you pay for. — Edith Piaf

As far as I'm concerned, love means fighting, big fat lies, and a couple of slaps across the face. — Edith Piaf

I loathed being sixty-four, and I will hate being sixty-five. I don't let on about such things in person; in person, I am cheerful and Pollyannaish. But the honest truth is that it's sad to be over sixty. The long shadows are everywhere - friends dying and battling illness. A miasma of melancholy hangs there, forcing you to deal with the fact that your life, however happy and successful, has been full of disappointments and mistakes, little ones and big ones. There are dreams that are never quite going to come true, ambitions that will never quite be realized. There are, in short, regrets. Edith Piaf was famous for singing a song called "Non, je ne regrette rien." It's a good song. I know what she meant. I can get into it; I can make a case that I regret nothing. After all, most of my mistakes turned out to be things I survived, or turned into funny stories, or, on occasion, even made money from. But — Nora Ephron

I was hungry. I was cold. But I was also free. Free not to get up in the morning, not to go to bed at night, free to get drunk if I liked, to dream ... to hope. — Edith Piaf

When you reach the top, you should remember to send the elevator back down for the others. — Edith Piaf

Americans want beauties, not me. I'm not the Parisian bombshell they expected. Can you see me as a chorus girl? Where's my feather up the ass? They think I'm sad, they're dumb. I don't connect to them. — Edith Piaf

You say things that make my eyes close and I find that marvelous. — Edith Piaf

I'd like to see one person - just one - who would own up to having been a coward. — Edith Piaf

There has been a marvelous joyous carnival of mourning for Edith Piaf and Jean Coctaeau, and it was real! They died as they had lived, with style and grace and their proper eccentricity; and Paris loves anybody who can live anarchically and be delightful entertainment at the same time. So do I. — Katherine Anne Porter

People say that I could sing the phone book and make it sound good. — Edith Piaf

I had a role in 'Crossroads' when I was about 21, and then I went on to perform in 'Small Change' and then 'Piaf' in the Donmar Warehouse, London, and it was when I was there that some casting directors spotted me. — Luke Evans

I want to make people cry even when they don't understand my words. — Edith Piaf

I think you have to pay for love with bitter tears. — Edith Piaf

I'm sure that I've already been dead. — Edith Piaf

Edith Piaf knocked my socks off when I was 8, but I didn't know what she was singing about. — Joni Mitchell

Performers and their public should never meet. Once the curtain comes down, the performer should fly away like a magician's dove. — Edith Piaf

Don't care what people say. Don't give a damn about their laws. — Edith Piaf

I listened to John Denver and Simon & Garfunkel. Edith Piaf was a huge favourite. Then I discovered musicals - I loved 'Les Miserables' - and, at about 14, I started listening to David Gray. — Gin Wigmore

For me, sleeping is a waste of time. I'm afraid to sleep. It's a form of death. — Edith Piaf

Whenever I hear Edith Piaf sing "Non, je ne regrette rien" - which is more often than I'd like, now that I'm at university - I can't help thinking, What the hell is she talking about? I regret pretty much everything. — David Nicholls

Love goes on a journey, like I do
One day I'll find it
By the time I see its face
I'll recognize it right away — Edith Piaf

I wouldn't mind at all coming back to earth after my death. — Edith Piaf

I don't lie; I improve on my life. — Edith Piaf

All I've done all my life is disobey. — Edith Piaf

My conservatory is in the streets. My intelligence is instinct. — Edith Piaf

I've been thinking about Jesus. Don't you find it a bit strange that, since He was living with His family and all, He up and left them just when they needed him most? — Edith Piaf

Use your faults, use your defects; then you're going to be a star. — Edith Piaf

I don't want to die an old lady. — Edith Piaf

Money? How did I lose it? I never did lose it. I just never knew where it went. — Edith Piaf

I want to move people the way Edith Piaf did. — Laura Branigan

Death does not exist. — Edith Piaf

Drugs are a carnival in hell. — Edith Piaf