Quotes from Patti Smith

We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world. There were temptations and witches and demons we never dreamed of and there was splendor we only partially imagined.

You can never pay too much for peace of mind.

I revisit my book piles. Trying not to be sidetracked or lured into another dimension.

That's the one with the magic, he would say.

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.

The act of writing in real time in order to deflect, escape, or slow it down is obviously futile yet not entirely fruitless.

Nos miramos las manos, que teníamos cogidas. Respiramos hondo y aceptamos nuestra complicidad, no en el robo, sino en la destrucción de una obra de arte. –Al menos, ellos no lo tendrán nunca –dijo. –¿Quiénes son ellos? –pregunté. –Cualquiera excepto nosotros –respondió.

I wiped the shit from my shoes again and again, still going about my business, that of being alive, the best I could.

We want things 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.

But we keep on going, he continued, fostering all kinds of crazy hopes. To redeem the lost, some sliver of personal revelation. It's an addiction, like playing the slots, or a game of golf.

There is no pure good, no pure evil, only purity.

I dreamed I was somewhere that was also nowhere.

Through it all we held fast to the concept of the clock with no hands. Tasks were completed, sump pumps manned, sandbags piled, trees planted, shirts ironed, hems stitched, and yet we reserved the right to ignore the hands that kept on turning.

It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that she was.

He took me in skeptically. "Darling, the ensemble is fabulous," he said, patting my hand, eyeing my black jacket, black tie, black silk shirt, and heavily pegged black satin pants, "but I'm not so sure about the white sneakers." "But they're essential to my costume." "Your costume? What are you dressed as?" "A tennis player in mourning.

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.

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.

I never knew whether his speedy speech patterns reflected amphetamine use or an amphetamine mind. He would often lead me up blind alleys or through an endless labyrinth of incomprehensible logic. I felt like Alice with the Mad Hatter, negotiating jokes without punch lines, and having to retrace my steps on the chessboard floor back to the logic of my own peculiar universe.

Oh take their picture," said the woman to her bemused husband, "I think they're artists." "Oh, go on," he shrugged. "They're just kids.

Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember.

I didn't mind the misery of a vocation but I dreaded not being called

Yesterday's poets are today's detectives. They spend a life sniffing out the hundredth line, wrapping up a case, and limping exhausted into the sunset.

The Chelsea was like a doll's house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe. I wandered the halls seeking its spirits, dead or alive.

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.