Quotes from Patti Smith

Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.

I'm certain, as we filled down the great staircase, that I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve years-old, all arms and legs. But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

I wish I could just project everything on the paper,

Within that moment was trust, compassion, and our mutual sense of irony. He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life. We were both aware of that, I know.

Not all dreams need to be realized.

When you hit a wall, just kick it in.

Much has been said about Robert, and more will be added. Young men will adopt his gait. Young girls will wear white dresses and mourn his curls. He will be condemned and adored. His excesses damned or romanticized. In the end, truth will be found in his work, the corporeal body of the artist. It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to him.

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.

We never had any children," he said ruefully. "Our work was our children.

Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed.

To be an artist is to enter into competition with god.

Just come back, I was thinking. You've been gone long enough. Just come back. I will stop traveling; I will wash your clothes.

Why do we write? A chorus erupts. Because we cannot simply live.

Writing is not some quiet, closet act.

I don't like answering to other people's philosophies. I don't have any philosophy, I just believe in stuff. Either I believe in something or I don't. Like, I believe in the Rolling Stones but not in the Dave Clark Five. There's nothing philosophic about it. Whenever I'm linked with a movement, it pisses me off.

Anxious for some permanency, I guess I needed to be reminded how temporal permanency is.

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.

Got to lose control before you take control.

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.

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.

I knew one day I would stop and he would keep on going, but until then nothing could tear us apart.

I'm off balance, not sure what's wrong. —You have misplaced joy, he said without hesitation. Without joy, we are as dead. —How do I find it again? —Find those who have it and bathe in their perfection.

The light poured through the windows upon his photographs and the poem of us sitting together a last time. Robert dying: creating silence. Myself, destined to live, listening closely to a silence that would take a lifetime to express.

We want thing 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.