Top 149 Quotes & Sayings by Alessia Cara

I just want to keep my normal life for as long as possible.

I remember making a 'thank you' video when one of my videos got to 50 views!

I was a very strange child.

Flannel shirts, denim, Converse, a guitar, messy hair? That's literally me.

I'm not a fitness model; I'm just a singer. If people focus on that, that's what I care about.

I want 'Scars to Your Beautiful' to reach different types of women. The girl I am talking about, it's me, it's you - it's every girl who has struggled with feeling not good enough. I want to talk about all the different extremes that girls go through to feel beautiful.

I feel like my whole life, I've had to prove myself to so many people because I'm young and because I'm a female; it's just constant. I'm always surprising people.

I wanted to get through high school anonymously.

I always find power in struggles. You end up a lot happier that way.

I always told myself that if I was going to be given a voice, I might as well say something worth listening to and not something that's just going to feed people stupidity.

You don't always have to be popular and do things everyone else is doing.

I didn't start writing songs, honestly, until I started making my album. I was always doing poetry, but I never thought I could write songs. I discouraged myself and thought it was so hard. But starting this process and learning just what it is to be a songwriter and performer taught me that you don't have to feel discouraged about anything.

I think the world is very closed-minded sometimes and very dated. We need to start opening our minds.

When I was really young, I was convinced I wanted to be a visual artist. I would paint and draw and make crafts.

Talent is talent, but fashion is separate, and it shouldn't be used to judge me as a singer.

Ninety per cent of my family are hairdressers, and the other 10% are construction workers.

I don't want to be cliched, but Buckingham Palace is beautiful, and the old red telephone booths are really interesting to me. I've always wanted to see those.

YouTube is my first love.

I think we all have the right to feel 100 percent beautiful and 100 percent confident without pleasing anybody 'cause we're not here for anybody else.

I never really necessarily liked being quiet.

Singing was something I always did. I really don't remember a time when I wasn't singing, even as a little child.

I've never really aspired to the spotlight; I just wanted to do music, which is kind of weird because music comes with that spotlight.

I'm definitely not a supermodel, a thousand per cent.

I was one of those weird kids who didn't really speak or smile. I remember my teachers would call home and ask if everything was fine at home because I would never smile. Then I got into this phase, from maybe fourth to eighth grade, where my personality just did a 180.

I think all teenagers feel a lot of things at once; everything's going crazy in our brain.

As a kid, my parents would always listen to a lot of Beatles, Queen, Elvis. My mom was born and raised in Italy, and my dad was born in Canada and moved back and forth between Canada and Italy, so they would also listen to all the big Italian stars like Eros Ramazzotti, Gigi D'Alessio, Tiziano Ferro, Laura Pausini.

I was too shy to do any vocal lessons or go to choirs; I just didn't want to be seen doing it. It's something that I kept to myself. I started easing into it, and I started doing talent shows, and YouTube really helped with that, too.

I feel like I'm in my own head a lot; it just feels amazing, but scary, weird and confusing.

My family is from the south of Italy in this little place called Calabria. It's a big part of my family, the Italian culture. I grew up around it. My parents speak Italian, and I speak Italian.

I don't want to have one hit, one song of the summer, and then have me disappear forever. I really want my things to last, and I want my songs and my bodies of work to resonate with people. I want to hit people - at least make a dent in them. I want to make a mark somehow.

Throughout my high school years, I was very quiet, I didn't have many friends. I distanced myself from a lot of people.

I do feel pressure from the outside world a little bit just because everybody wants new music, which is really nice. It just proves that everybody likes what I'm doing. But at the same time, I feel like it's important to just chill and experience things and really make the songs true to me.

I loved the Black Eyed Peas. I was obsessed with them, and they were my favorite group ever, and Amy Winehouse, as well; I love her.

It's good to have a reminder that we can love ourselves and be beautiful even though we don't really fit into certain standards of what beauty may be.

I don't really think I got the full high school experience, only because when I got to high school for the first year, it was grades 9-10. We didn't have older grades. But besides that, it was normal. It was a regular public school. We didn't have much going on. It wasn't too crazy.

Body image is something that girls struggle with every day, and it's something that I struggle with every day.

I first picked up a guitar when I was ten years old; my parents surprised me with it for my tenth birthday. I started taking lessons when I was thirteen, but only for a few months, and then I just kept teaching myself.

I guess people don't think that young girls or young artists have opinions, but I'm so glad that there's artists like Lorde and Raury and Kehlani because they're showing other people that young people can have an opinion and a voice and do really well with it. I'm glad I can be one of those people.

Canada is a really big melting pot of cultures, so we ended up with a giant mosaic of different music.

I think fame is such a scary thing, and it's something I can never understand. It's terrifying, but it's the only way I get to do what I love every day, you know?

I see songs in colors; I see days of the week. Each day of the week I relate to a gender, and it's very weird. I can taste words sometimes. It's very strange.

I'm just glad that there's some diversity in the music industry with women so people know that you can be literally anything and still be able to make it.

In second grade, I told a bunch of kids there was a homeless person living between the portable classrooms outside our school. It caused panic, and the principal had to announce on the P.A. system that no one was living there. I pretended I didn't know who started the rumor.

Realize that everyone that you think is perfect feels like they're not good enough, too.

The definition of being a feminist is equality, and if you're not a feminist at this point, then what are you really promoting?

We should just know that we can all create this special, safe place within ourselves that we can feel comfortable in and that doesn't necessarily have to be with other people.

I wasn't even popular at school.

I don't wear a lot of makeup ever, even when I do interviews or when I'm on TV. I just keep it me, and I think it's important to show people I'm a regular person and regular people are beautiful, too.

The biggest critics are in the comments online. People are so judgmental of me. It's like, 'Why is she wearing this?' or 'Why isn't she wearing that?' or 'Why does she talk like that?' That's the worst because they're judging for no reason.

Having a mom as a hairdresser was really awesome: I was always her test dummy. I've had every style, every color you could imagine.

I've always been self-conscious about my personality.

Both my parents are Italian. My mom was born and raised in Italy. My dad was born in Canada, but then they moved to Italy.

I've never hosted a party in my life, not even my own birthday party. I'd feel really uncomfortable saying, 'Hey everybody, let's celebrate me!' But I'm not antisocial. I don't hate people.

It's amazing: it's so cool being from Brampton, Ontario, and being able to travel the world and being embraced by so many countries.

Once you put songs out, they're not yours anymore. They're everyone else's.

Beauty comes in all forms. It's not just external; it's internal as well.

I'm really in touch with my Italian roots. My mom's whole side of the family is there.

Music was something I found on my own. I got my first guitar when I was around 10, and it just all developed over time.

I don't put the focus on things that don't matter.

I had a fairly regular childhood. I was a pretty boring kid. I didn't do much. I was always thinking, but I didn't really say a lot.