Patti Smith Quotes

“I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side.”
― patti smith, Just Kids

“Dylan and Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith, all dark, all romantic. When I say “romantic,” I mean a sensibility that sees everything, and has to express everything, and still doesn’t know what the fuck it is, it hurts that bad. It just madly tries to speak whatever it feels, and that can mean vast things. That sort of mentality can turn a sun-kissed orange into a flaming meteorite, and make it sound like that in a song.”
― Jeff Buckley

“Everything comes down so pasteurized
everything comes down 16 degrees
they say your amplifier is too loud
turn your amplifier down
are we high all alone on our knees
memory is just hips that swing
like a clock
the past projects fantastic scenes
tic/toc tic/toc tic/toc
fuck the clock!”
― Patti Smith, Babel

“Why do we write? A chorus erupts.
Because we cannot simply live.”
― Patti Smith, Devotion

“When you hit a wall – of your own imagined limitations – just kick it in.”
― Sam Shepard

“We learned we wanted too much. We could only give from the perspective of who we were and what we had. Apart, we were able to see with even greater clarity that we didn’t want to be without each other.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“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, M Train

“...heroine: the artist, the premier mistress writhering in a garden graced w/highly polished blades of grass... release (ethiopium) is the drug...an animal howl says it all...notes pour into the caste of freedom...the freedom to be intense...to defy social order and break the slow kill monotony of censorship. to break from the long bonds of servitude-ruthless adoration of the celestial shepherd. let us celebrate our own flesh-to embrace not ones race mais the marathon-to never let go of the fiery sadness called desire.”
― 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, M Train

“-What is nothing? I impetuously asked.
-It is what you can see of your eyes without a mirror, was the answer.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“We sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“I was never going to become anything but myself, that i was of the clan of Peter Pan and we did not grow up”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I may not know what is in your mind, but I know how your mind works.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“Some dreams aren't dreams at all, just another angle of physical reality.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“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

“Ed Friedman: [talking about Patti Smith] One time she told me, "Allen Ginsberg thought I was a cute boy and he tried to pick me up, so I said, "LOOK AT THE TITS, ALLEN! NOTICE THE TITS!”
― Legs McNeil, Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

“-I love you, I whispered to all, to none.
-Love not lightly, I heard him say.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“Querido Robert,

A menudo, cuando no puedo dormir, me pregunto si tú tampoco puedes. ¿Tienes dolor o te sientes solo? Tú me sacaste del período más oscuro de mi juventud, compartiendo conmigo el misterio sagrado de lo que es ser artista. Aprendí a ver a través de ti y jamás he compuesto un verso ni he dibujado una curva que no provenga del conocimiento que obtuve en nuestro precioso tiempo juntos. Tu trabajo, que emana de una fuente generosa, se remonta a la canción desnuda de tu juventud. En ese entonces hablabas de tomar la mano de Dios. Recuerda, a pesar de todo, que siempre has tomado esa mano, agárrala con fuerza, Robert, y no la sueltes.

La otra tarde, cuando te quedaste dormido sobre mi hombro, yo también me quedé dormida. Pero antes de hacerlo pensé -mientras miraba todas tus cosas y creaciones, y repasaba tus años de trabajo- que de todas tus obras, tú continúas siendo la más bella. La obra más bella de todas.

Patti”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Kristus var en värdig man att göra uppror mot, för han var själv upproret personifierat.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I have a lock of his hair, a handful of his ashes, a box of his letters, a goatskin tambourine. And in the folds of faded violet tissue a necklace, two violet plaques etched in Arabic, strung with black and silver threads, given to me by the boy who loved Michelangelo.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Robert morente, creava il silenzio. Io, destinata alla vita, prestai ascolto a un silenzio che avrebbe richiesto un'esistenza intera per trovare le parole.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Thus we joined spirit with Joan Didion and Patti Smith and about a million other dreamers who, against all odds, had landed here, moving on fumes of reveries, to New York City.”
― Aspen Matis, Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

“Life at the Chelsea was an open market, everyone with something of himself to sell.” (p.107) (..)the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard [gerente do hotel] in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if nobody in the outside world.” (p.91). (…) The Chelsea was like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Life at the Chelsea was an open market, everyone with something of himself to sell. (..) the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if nobody in the outside world (…) The Chelsea was like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed.
It leads to each other. We become ourselves.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“It is said that children do not distinguish between living and inanimate objects; I believe they do. A child imparts a doll or a tin soldier with magical life breath. The artist animates his work as the child his toys”
― Patti Smith

“Kendimi anında, ince ve uzun boylu olan ve bir o kadar da abartılı hikayeler anlatan, başı belaya giren, gündelik işlerini unutuveren Davy ile özdeşleştirdim. Babası Davy’nin incir çekirdeğini doldurmayacak biri olduğunu düşünüyordu. Sadece yedi yaşındaydım ve bu cümle aklımı başımdan aldı. Babası ne demek istemiş olabilirdi? Geceleri yatağa yattığımda bunu düşünüp durdum. İncir çekirdeği nasıl dolardı? O kadar mı değerli ve önemliydi yani? Herhangi bir şeyin çekirdeği Davy Crockett gibi bir oğlanla aynı değerde olabilir miydi?
…
Sonunda Davy Crockett’in paha biçilemez biri olduğunu anladım, babası tarafından bile. Tüm eksikliklere rağmen faydalı olabilmek adına delicesine çalıştı ve babasının tüm borçlarını ödedi. Yasak kitabı defalarca okudum, zihnimi beklenmedik yerlere götüren yollarda peşi sıra gittim. Yolda kaybolma ihtimalime karşılık yürürken önüme çıkan ıslak yaprak yığınının arasında bulduğum bir pusulam vardı. Eski ve paslıydı ama hala çalışıyor, yeryüzüyle gökyüzünü birleştiriyordu. Bana nerede durduğumu, batının neresi olduğunu söyledi ama nereye gittiğime ve benim değerime dair tek kelime etmedi.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“I rush home and put the record on ['Horses’ by Patti Smith]. It hurts through stream of consciousness, careers into poetry and dissolves into sex. [...] She’s a private person who dares to let go in front of everyone, puts herself out there and risks falling flat on her face. Up until now girls have been controlled and restrained. Patti Smith is abandoned. [...] Listening to Horses unlocks an idea for me - girls’ sexuality can be on their own terms, for their own pleasure or creative work, not just for exploitation or to get a man. [...] Hearing Patti Smith be sexual, building to an organic crescendo, whilst leading a band, is so exciting. It’s emancipating. If I can take a quarter or even eighth of what she has and not give a shit about making a fool of myself, maybe I can still do something with my life.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“For those of us who felt more comfortable around books than people, Smith made literature and reading not just desirable, but also implicit.”
― Caryn Rose, Why Patti Smith Matters