Quotes from Patti Smith

I always hated loose ends. Dangling phrases, unopened packages, or a character that inexplicably disappears, like a lone sheet on a clothesline before a vague storm, left to flap in the wind until that same wind carries it away to become the skin of a ghost or a child's tent.

There are stacks of notebooks that speak of years of aborted efforts, deflated euphoria, a relentless pacing of the boards. We must write, engaging in a myriad of struggles, as if breaking in a willful foal. We must write, but not without consistent effort and a measure of sacrifice: to channel the future, to revisit childhood, and to rein in the follies and horrors of the imagination for a pulsating race of readers.

Apart, we were able to see with even greater clarity that we didn't want to be without each other. I

The tequila was light, like flower juice. I closed my eyes and saw a green train with an M in a circle; a faded green like the back of a praying mantis.

The air was heavy with unstable chemicals, mold, and the earthy stench of hashish. The fat of candles burned, great tears of wax spilling onto the sidewalk.

I followed whatever train I wanted. I wrote without writing—of genies and hustlers and mythic travelers, my vagabondia. Then I would walk back home, happily satisfied, and resume my daily tasks.

I loved my coat and the cafe and my morning routine. It was the clearest and simplest expression of my solitary identity.

Fred didn't swim either. He said Indians didn't swim.

I'm a worker. I do the work to communicate, and I want people to embrace it, and when they do I'm happy.

The new artists coming through were very materialistic and Hollywood, not so engaged in communication.

It was unsettling to imagine it alone on the bench without a film, unable to record its own passage into the hands of a stranger.

I had to learn, really, how to rein in my energies and discipline myself. And I found it very very useful. I rebelled against it at first, but it's a good thing to have.

Leaves as vowels, whispers of words like a breath of net. Leaves are vowels, I sweep them up hoping to find the combinations I am looking for.

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.

Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.

Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.

We sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality (p.43)

a black granite cube containing only the character mu

And these words of advice, imparted with such undivided grace, filled my limbs with such a lightness that I was lifted and left to glide above the grass, although it appeared to all that I was still among them, wrapped in human tasks, with both feet on the ground.

It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies.

I raided libraries and church bazaars for art books. It was possible then to find beautiful volumes for next to nothing and I happily dwelt in the world of Modigliani, Dubuffet, Picasso, Fra Angelico, and Albert Ryder.

table cleared and new napkins and clean utensils laid, as if they had never been there.

We broke our mother's heart and became ourselves. We proceeded to breathe and therefore to leave, drunken, astonished, each of us a god.

Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory. — Patti Smith, M Train (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)