Love Quote by Van Morrison

There is a quiet sting in Morrison's phrasing: Ireland is framed as both home and hall of mirrors. "I'd love to live in Ireland" opens with tenderness, then immediately tightens into a condition - "but I'd like to live as me". The pivot tells you what fame steals first: the right to be ordinary. He isn't describing a housing preference; he's describing a loss of civic anonymity, the simple freedom to move through a place without being cast in someone else's story.

The key line is "not what someone thinks I am". That "someone" is doing a lot of work: fans projecting mystique, media flattening a complicated person into a brand, locals policing authenticity ("real" Irishness, "real" Morrison), even the tourism-slick version of Belfast and beyond that likes its legends conveniently packaged. Morrison's whole career trades in a kind of spiritual privacy - songs that sound confessional while withholding the biographical keys. Here, he names the cost of being made legible.

"People don't understand" carries the exhausted defensiveness of a public figure trying to explain an invisible injury. Then comes the clincher: "I lived there before I was famous". It's a claim to a past self that predates the mythology, a reminder that belonging isn't something you earn with acclaim. It's something you lose when your presence becomes public property. The subtext is almost elegiac: Ireland isn't rejecting him; celebrity has turned Ireland into a stage where he can't stop being watched.