Quotes from Patti Smith

Do not cast your boat on a river of tears, cried the tearing wind. Small hands are still, be still. She knelt then lay on her side, clutching a key, accepting kindness of endless sleep.

Ich war zu neugierig auf die Zukunft, um zurückzuschauen.

Mein Hemd war etwas zerknittert, aber warum sollte es ihm besser gehen als mir.

Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine. I had written the line before as a declaration of existence, as a vow to take responsibility for my own actions.

Aprendi com ele que muitas vezes a contradição é o caminho mais claro para a verdade.

His mission was not to reveal, but to document an aspect of sexuality as art, as it had never been done before.

I had the distinct feeling that something was going to happen. I feared it would be a piercing event, a right-out-of-the-blue thing or worse, a profound nonevent.

Kahkahalar. Hayatta kalabilmek için önemli bir malzeme. Ve biz s?k s?k kahkaha atard?k.

Robert had little patience with these introspective bouts of mine. He never seemed to question his artistic drives, and by his example, I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-charged.

Murakami is not here anyway, I thought. He is most likely somewhere else, sealed in a space capsule in the center of a field of lavender, laboring over words.

There were no ashtrays and no sign of my philosophic cowpoke. I sensed he had been heading this way and most likely, spotting the spanking new paint job, just kept on going. I looked around. Nothing to hold me here, either, not even the dried carcass of a dead bee.

I tried to write something about Jesse but couldn't, as her face echoed her father's and the proud palace where the ghosts of our old life dwell.

The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.

It occurred to me that I was on a run of suicides. Akutagawa. Dazai. Plath. Death by water, barbiturates, and carbon monoxide poisoning; three fingers of oblivion, outplaying everything.

The brilliant trees burned through the heavy mist and he climbed them to pluck leaves of gold, cramming fistfuls inside his sweater, imagining the wealth that would be his.

the incisive observational powers of a female surgeon cutting out her own heart.

that he was a good boy trying to be bad.

He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn't matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language. Eventually they would record this abstract universal language of music in his new studio. "The language of peace. You dig?" I did.

Its great thorns pierced the canvas, and its heavy fragrance rushed within, enveloping his sleep, becoming one with his breath, and penetrated the chambers of his exploding heart.

I saw him paused before a headstone that read 'Son your mother is praying for you.

It was exciting just to stand in front of the hallowed ground of Birdland that had been blessed by John Coltrane, or the Five Spot on St. Mark's Place where Billie Holiday used to sing, where Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman opened the field of jazz like human can openers.

I had to keep swatting flies away, but that didn't bother me. Nothing bothered me, not even the things that bothered me.

The spirits rose like an ether that spun an arabesque and touched down as gently as a benevolent mask.

Like Jean Genet, Robert was a terrible thief. Genet was caught and imprisoned for stealing rare volumes of Proust and rolls of silk from a shirt maker. Aesthetic thieves. I imagined his sense of horror and triumph as bits of Blake swirled into the sewers of New York City.