Year of the Monkey Quotes

“The trouble with dreaming is that we eventually wake up.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“I could feel the gravitational pull of home, which when I'm home too long becomes the gravitational pull of somewhere else.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“This is what I know - Sam is dead. My brother is dead. My mother is dead. My father is dead. My husband is dead. My cat is dead. My dog, who was dead in 1957, is still dead. Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen. Maybe tomorrow.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“Nothing bothered me, not even the things that bothered me.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“Nothing is ever solved, Solving is an illusion. There are moments of spontaneous brightness, when the mind appears emancipated, but this is more epiphany.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

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

“Our quiet rage gives us wings, the possibility to negotiate the gears winding backwards uniting all time.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“You don’t follow plots you negotiate them.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“Our dreams are a second life.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“—There are many truths and there are many worlds, said the sign solemnly.
—Yes, I said, feeling quite humbled. And you were right. I did dream, many dreams, and they were much more than dreams, as if originating from the dawn of the mind. Yes, I absolutely dreamed.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“A stretch of time when I was rewarded with so many mystic moments, a chunk of red chalk, a chestnut, a rusted piece of scrap metal, a nail, a flat stone shaped like an ancient tablet. Although suggesting little of the magnificent work I had seen, these objects helped inspire my newfound contentedness. I placed them with the same care as a police detective into a clean plastic bag. Evidence of an awareness of the relative value of insignificant things.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“Despite all efforts, February just slips away, though being a leap year there is one extra day to observe.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“But then everything eventually changes. It’s the way of the world. Cycles of death and resurrection, but not always in the way we imagine. For instance, we might all resurrect looking way different, wearing outfits we’d never be caught dead in.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“The act of writing in real time in order to deflect, escape, or slow it down is obviously futile yet not entirely fruitless.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“Lisbon is a good city to get lost in. Mornings in cafes scribbling in yet another notebook, each blank page offering escape, the pen serving, fluid and constant. I sleep well, dream little, simply exists within an uninterrupted interlude.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“You don’t see things like that. You feel them, as in all important things; they arrive, they come into your dreams.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“I had bad feelings about an election in the year of the monkey. Don't worry, everyone said, the majority rules. No so, I retaliated, the silent rule and it will be decided by them, those who do not vote. And who can blame them, when it's all a pack of lies, a tainted election lined in waste? A true darkening of days. All of the resources that could be used to scrape away lead from the walls of crumbling schools, to shelter the homeless, or to clean a foul river. Instead, one candidate desperately shovels money down a pit, and the other builds empty edifices in his own name, another kind of immoral waste. Nonetheless, despite the misgivings, I voted.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“I felt connected to the modest peace offered with the fare, thinking about nothing. Just wisps of things, meaningless things, like remembering my mother once told me that Van Johnson always wore red socks, even in black and white movies.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“We greet 2020 as our constitutional moral center is being re-designed in an increasingly immoral way, governed by those professing to have a hold on Christian values yet sidestepping the core of Christianity – to love one another. Their necks turn from the suffering as they willingly follow one lacking an authentic responsiveness to a waning human condition. I had hoped for a more enlightened scenario for our new decade, imagining ceremonial panels opening, as the wings of great altarpieces on feast days, revealing 2020 as the year of perfect vision. Perhaps these expectations were naïve and yet were truly felt, just as the anguish of inequity is felt, a dark blot that will not go away.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“Things are changing at a speed we never dreamed. We’ll be talking nuclear war. Pesticides will be a food group. No song birds, no wildflowers. Nothing but collapsing hives and lines of the rich getting ready to board a ship for a night on the moon.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“I thought of Thomas Paine‘s words: these are the times that try men’s souls. Outside, the rain ceased but high winds remained. And what was truth remained the truth. It was the last day of the year of the monkey and the golden cockerel was crowing, for the insufferable yellow-haired confidence man had been sworn in, with a Bible no less, and Moses and Jesus and Buddha and Mohamed seemed somewhere else entirely.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“I wiped the shit from my shoes again and again, still going about my business, that of being alive, the best I could.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“Every Saturday I would go to the library and choose my books for the week. One late-autumn morning, despite menacing clouds, I bundled up and walked as always, past the peach orchards, the pig farm and the skating rink to the fork in the road that led to our sole library. The sight of so many books never failed to excite me, rows and rows of books with multicolored spines. I’d spent an inordinate amount of time choosing my stack of books that day, with the sky growing more ominous. At first, I wasn’t worried as I had long legs and was a pretty fast walker, but then it became apparent that there was no way I was going to beat the impending storm. It grew colder, the winds picked up, followed by heavy rains, then pelting hail. I slid the books under my coat to protect them, I had a long way to go; I stepped in puddles and could feel the icy water permeate my ankle socks. When I finally reached home my mother shook her head with sympathetic exasperation, prepared a hot bath and made me go to bed. I came down with bronchitis and missed several days of school. But it had been worth it, for I had my books, among them The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, Half Magic and The Dog of Flanders. Wonderful books that I read over and over, only accessible to me through our library.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“Those things are forbidden, as entreating the angels with prayer. I know that very well, one cannot ask for a life, or two lives. One can only warrant the hope of an increasing potency in each man's heart.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“I commenced with my chores, whistling an oft-forgotten tune, certain that we, as the seasons, prevail and that ten thousand years is yet a blink in the eye of a ringed planet or that of an archangel armed with a sword of glass.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“The grains pour and I find myself missing the dead more than usual. I notice that I cry more when watching television, triggered by romance, a retiring detective shot in the back while staring into the sea, a weary father lifting his infant from a crib. I notice that my own tears burn my eyes, that I am no longer a fast runner and that my sense of time seems to be accelerating...Since contemplating Marcus, I try to be more aware of the passing hours, that I might see it happen, that cosmic shift from one digit to another. Despite all my efforts February just slips away, though being a leap year there is one extra day to observe. I stare at the number 29 on the daily calendar, then reluctantly tear off the page. March first.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“I felt a cosmic pull in multiple directions and wondered if some idiosyncratic force field was shielding yet another field, one with a small orchard at its crux, heavy with a fruit containing an unfathomable core.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen. Maybe tomorrow. A tomorrow following a whole succession of tomorrows.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“Will the children of the future never taste the sweetness of brotherhood?”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“and men falling like chess pieces carved from the weight of centuries of indiscretions and the slaughter of worshippers and the guns and the guns and the guns and the guns.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey