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

“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

“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

“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

“...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

“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

“The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!
The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand
and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is
holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an
angel!”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

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

“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

“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

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

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

“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 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

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

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

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

“Kahkahalar. Hayatta kalabilmek için önemli bir malzeme. Ve biz sık sık kahkaha atardık.”
― Patti Smith

“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

“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