Creativity Quote by Rosanne Cash

A lot of people talk about forgiveness like its a warm glow; Rosanne Cash frames it as energy management. In that small pivot, she swaps sanctimony for strategy. "I choose" is the key verb: not "I feel" or "I believe", but an active, daily decision. That makes the line less about moral purity than about refusing to be recruited by uglier impulses. Revenge and hatred are named as emotions, but "the desire to subjugate" is named as something colder and more structural: power. Cash is drawing a boundary not only against private rage but against the seductive fantasy that domination will heal a wound.

The subtext is that these feelings are contagious and expensive. "Give energy" carries the logic of an artist who knows attention is a finite resource: what you feed grows, what you starve shrinks. There's also an implicit critique of a culture that monetizes outrage and calls it strength. She isn't denying anger; she's denying it the steering wheel.

Coming from a musician whose career has lived in the long shadow of American mythmaking (family legacy, politics, faith, the South), the line reads like a refusal to perform grievance for applause. It suggests a mature kind of defiance: not the noisy clapback, but the quieter choice to stay ungoverned by people who want you reactive. The power move is opting out.