Patti Smith Quotes

It ain't so easy writing about nothin
Patti Smith
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
Patti Smith
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
Patti Smith
Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.
Patti Smith
-What is nothing? I impetuously asked.-It is what you can see of your eyes without a mirror, was the answer.
Patti Smith
In my way of thinking, anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.
Patti Smith
I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth
Patti Smith
He took twelve pictures that day.Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. "This one has the magic," he said. When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.
Patti Smith
A real prison breakfast" I said."Yeah, but we are free."And that summed it up.
Patti Smith
There's always new stuff, that's for sure.
Patti Smith
How wonderful it would be to meet an angel, I mused, but then I immediately realised that I already had. Not an archangel like Saint Michael, but my human engel from Detroit, wearing an overcoat and no hat, with lank brown hair and eyes the coler of water.
Patti Smith
How wonderful it would be to meet an angel, I mused, but then I immediately realised I already had. Not an archangel like Saint Michael, but my human angel from Detroit, wearing an overcoat and no hat, with lank brown hair and eyes the coler of water.
Patti Smith
And the eye became a body, the murky heart of a rose. The sinister shadow of an orchid. Or the indolent poppy balanced behind the ear of Baudelaire.
Patti Smith
William Burroughs was simultaneously old and young. Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer. He had a medicine chest he kept locked, but if you were in pain he would open it. He did not like to see his loved ones suffer. If you were infirm he would feed you. He’d appear at your door with a fish wrapped in newsprint and fry it up. He was inaccessible to a girl but I loved him anyway.
Patti Smith
I paced while he slept, ricocheting like a dove skidding the lonely confines of a Joseph Cornell box.
Patti Smith
I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we thing we won't, that we are different. As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old?
Patti Smith
Observing people taking in the work I had watched Robert create was an emotional experience. It had left our private world. It was what I had always wanted for him, but I felt a slight pang of possessiveness sharing it with others. Overriding that feeling was the joy of seeing Robert's face, suffused with confirmation, as he glimpsed the future he had so resolutely sought and had worked so hard to achieve.
Patti Smith
Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?
Patti Smith
He recognizes voices within silence. (of Max Sebald)
Patti Smith
I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we think we won’t, that we are different. As a child I thought I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old? I say to my joints, my iron-colored hair. Now I am older than my love, my departed friends. Perhaps I will live so long that the New York Public Library will be obliged to hand over the walking stick of Virginia Woolf. I would cherish it for her, and the stones in her pocket. But I would also keep on living, refusing to surrender my pen.
Patti Smith
Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself.
Patti Smith
We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow.
Patti Smith
Home is a desk. The amalgamation of a dream. Home is the cats, my books, and my work never done. All the lost things that may one day call to me, the faces of my children who will one day call to me. Maybe we can't draw flesh from reverie nor retrieve a dusty spur, but we can gather the dream itself and bring it back uniquely whole.
Patti Smith
I wanted to cry so bad, but my tears are inside. A blindfold keeps them there. I can’t see today. Patti, I don’t know anything.
Patti Smith
Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.
Patti Smith
Is it time uninterrupted? Only the present comprehended? Are our thoughts nothing but passing trains, no stops, devoid of dimension, whizzing by massive posters with repeating images? Catching a fragment from a window seat, yet another fragment from the next identical frame? If I write in the present yet digress, is that still real time? Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.
Patti Smith
I don't fuck much with the past but I fuck plenty with the future.
Patti Smith
Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.
Patti Smith
I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one
Patti Smith
I may not know what is in your mind, but I know how your mind works.
Patti Smith
All I needed for the mind was to be led to new stations. All I needed for the heart was to visit a place of greater storms.
Patti Smith
It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was.
Patti Smith
It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171).
Patti Smith
We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity.
Patti Smith
I had one of those headaches. It kept pounding and got into that crazy realm where the guillotine seems like a good idea.
Patti Smith
I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.
Patti Smith
Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.
Patti Smith
I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.
Patti Smith
I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon realized it was a tremendous stroke of luck to end up there. We could have had a fair-seized railroad flat in the East Village for what we were paying, but to dwell in this eccentric and damned hotel provided a sense of security as well as a stellar education. The goodwill that surrounded us was proof that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children.
Patti Smith
He wrote me a note to say we would create art together and we would make it, with or without the rest of the world.
Patti Smith
He picks the lock of her dreams with her own hairpin.
Patti Smith
And then I walked out, straight through the twilight, treading the beaten earth. There were no dust clouds, no signs of anyone, but I paid no mind. I was my own lucky hand of solitaire. The desert landscape unchanging: a long, unwinding scroll that I would one day amuse myself by filling. I'm going to remember everything and then I'm going to write it all down. An aria to a coat. A requiem for a café. That's what I was thinking, in my dream, looking down at my hands.
Patti Smith
We didn’t have to talk then, and that is real friendship. Never uncomfortable with silence, which, in its welcome form, is yet an extension of conversation.
Patti Smith
Please, no matter how we advance in technology please don't abandon the book-there is nothing in our material world more beautiful than a book.
Patti Smith
Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the
Patti Smith
I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand,that Joplin had the last drunken throat,that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.
Patti Smith
A writer or any artist can’t expect to be embraced by the people. I've done records where it seemed like no one listened to them. You write poetry books that maybe 50 people read. And you just keep doing your work because you have to, because it’s your calling.But it’s beautiful to be embraced by the people.Some people have said to me, “Well, don’t you think that kind of success spoils one as an artist? If you’re a punk rocker, you don’t want to have a hit record…”And I say to them, “Fuck you!” One does their work for the people. And the more people you can touch, the more wonderful it is. You don’t do your work and say, “I only want the cool people to read it.” You want everyone to be transported, or hopefully inspired by it.When I was really young, William Burroughs told me, “Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work. And make the right choices and protect your work. And if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency.
Patti Smith
Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.
Patti Smith
We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world.
Patti Smith
Everything comes down so pasteurizedeverything comes down 16 degreesthey say your amplifier is too loudturn your amplifier downare we high all alone on our kneesmemory is just hips that swinglike a clockthe past projects fantastic scenestic/toc tic/toc tic/tocfuck the clock!
Patti Smith
He wasn't supposed to die,' he cried out, somewhat desperately, petulantly, like a spoiled child. But I could hear other thoughts racing between us.Neither are you.Neither am I.
Patti Smith
In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.
Patti Smith
...the law of empathy, by which he could, by his will, transfer himself into an object or a work of art, and thus inflence the outer world. He did not feel redeemed by the work he did. He did not seek redemption. He sought to see what others did not, the projection of his imagination.
Patti Smith
Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional.
Patti Smith
Freedom is...the right to write the wrong words.
Patti Smith