Quotes from Patti Smith

I stared up at the plaster ceiling as I had done as a child. It seemed to me that the vibrating patterns overhead were sliding into place. The mandala of my life.

I stand naked when I draw. God holds my hand and we sing together." His manifesto as an artist.

each possessed something the other wanted and, in that way, complemented the other.

Such things that disappear in time that we find ourselves longing to see again. We search for them in close-up as we search for our hands in a dream.

I felt connected to the modest peace offered with the fare, thinking about nothing. Just wisps of things, meaningless things, like remembering my mother once told me that Van Johnson always wore red socks, even in black and white movies.

Shard by shard we are released from the tyranny of so-called time.

The café I'll never realize, the cafés I'll never know.

To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-charged.

What a drug this little book is; to imbibe it is to find oneself presuming his process. I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself. It is not mere envy but a delusional quickening in the blood.

Most of the time, it seemed as if the piece was fully formed in his mind. He was not one for improvising. It was more a question of executing something he saw in a flash.

There were days, rainy gray days, when the streets of Brooklyn were worthy of a photograph, every window the lens of a Leica, the view grainy and immobile.

I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know

Sometimes I wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.

Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine." I had written the line some years before as a declaration of existence, as a vow to take responsibility for my own actions. Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself.

I should get out of here, I am thinking, out of the city. But where would I go that I would not drag my seemingly incurable lethargy along with me, like the worn canvas sack of an angst-driven teenage hockey player?

Crazy Horse believes that he will be victorious in battle, but if he stops to take spoils from the battlefield, he will be defeated. He tattoos lightning bolts on the ears of his horses so the sight of them will remind him of this as he rides. I tried to apply this lesson to the things at hand, careful not to take spoils that were not rightfully mine.

El taxi llega tan rápido que no me da tiempo a elegir qué libros llevarme. La perspectiva de embarcar en un avión sin un libro me produce una oleada de pánico. El libro adecuado puede ser una especie de maestro, que marca el tono o incluso altera el curso de un viaje.

said good-bye to my corner. —What will happen to the tables and chairs? I asked.

Free of all expectation or desire, she spun, and was at once the loom, the thread, the strand of gold

This is it, this is mine.

Having no past we have only present and future. We would all like to believe that we came from nowhere but ourselves, every gesture is our own. But then we find we belong to the history and fate of a long line of beings that also may have wished to be free

I feel a real responsibility to the images I get attached to.

One step into a living space and one can sense the centrality of work in a life.

In all the world one may always hope to recapture something lost.