Quotes from Patti Smith

I was there for these moments, but so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments.

I may not know what is in your mind, but I know how your mind works.

The Chelsea was like a doll's house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe.

I knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something.

The mind of a child is like a kiss on the forehead — open and disinterested

These things were in my mind from the first moment I entered the vocal booth. The gratitude I had for rock and roll as it pulled me through a difficult adolescence. The joy I experienced when I danced. The moral power I gleaned in taking responsibility for one's action.-- 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.

I climb the side of a volcano carved from ice, heat drawn from the well of devotion that is the female heart.

Shard by shard we are released from the tyranny of so-called time. A curtain of purple wisteria partially conceals the entrance to a familiar garden... In a wink, a lifetime, we pass through the infinite movements of a silent overture.

Holding onto the naive belief that travel will open.

I suspected my soul, being mischievous, might slip away while I was dreaming and fail to return.

It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171).

A real prison breakfast" I said. "Yeah, but we are free." And that summed it up.

Closure is an illusion, the winking of the eye of a storm. Nothing is completely resolved in life, nothing is perfect. The important thing is to keep living because only by living can you see what happens next." - on Murakami's 'Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage' in The New York Times

We needed time to figure out what all of this meant, how we were going to come to terms and redefine what our love was called. I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth.

Some dreams aren't dreams at all, just another angle of physical reality.

People say beware, but I don't care. Their words are just rules and regulations to me.

The transformation of the heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there.

I reflected on the fact that no matter how good I aspired to be, I was never going to achieve perfection

I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés.

I wrote to give myself something to read.

Your work, coming from a fluid source, can be traced to the naked song of your youth. You spoke then of holding hands with God. Remember, through everything, you have always held that hand, grip it hard, Robert, and don't let go. (letter to Robert Mapplethorpe, 1970)

I drew no line between life and art. I was the same on- as offstage.

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.