Quotes from Patti Smith

Sentivo di essermi trasformata, toccata dalla rivelazione che l'arte è creata dagli esseri umani, che essere un artista voleva dire vedere ciò che gli altri non potevano vedere. Non avevo prove di possedere la stoffa dell'artista, ma bramavo esserlo con tutta me stessa [...] Mi domandai se meritavo davvero di essere un'artista; non mi preoccupavo delle sofferenze che una vocazione avrebbe comportato, m avevo il terrore di non ricevere la chiamata.

The old world and the emerging one served up in the brick and mortar of the artisan and the architects.

I knew he didn't love me, but I adored him anyway

Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods.

I was busy thinking about the mystery of expanding network of seemingly unasawerable questions.

But his service was to art, not to church or country. His beads, dungarees, and sheepskin vest represented not the costume but an expression of freedom.

Please stay forever I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow.

where there were angels I saw no one. nothing. not even space.

We were the rebels without a cause and he was our Sal Mineo.

Then there are the scores of notebooks, their contents calling — confession, revelation, endless variations of the same paragraph — and piles of napkins scrawled with incomprehensible rants. Dried-out ink bottles, encrusted nibs, cartridges for pens long gone, mechanical pencils emptied of lead. Writer's debris.

In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell of prayer.

Things are changing at a speed we never dreamed. We'll be talking nuclear war. Pesticides will be a food group. No song birds, no wildflowers. Nothing but collapsing hives and lines of the rich getting ready to board a ship for a night on the moon.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves?

to have no need for the apparatus of the operating room to be safe from all bodily harm to know love without exception to be a saint in any form

El muchacho que yo había conocido era tímido y tenía dificultad para expresarse. Le gustaba dejarse llevar, que lo cogieran de la mano para entrar sin reservas en un mundo distinto. Era masculino y protector, pese a ser femenino y sumiso. Meticuloso en su vestuario y modales, también era capaz de un desorden atemorizante en su obra. Sus mundos eran solitarios y peligrosos, y vaticinaban libertad, éxtasis y liberación.

Nothing really matches the atmosphere of the old Polaroid film. Except perhaps a poem, a musical phrase, or a forest hung with mist.

I wished nothing more than to say my prayers, yet these words troubled me and I plagued her with questions. What is the soul? What color is it? I suspected my soul, being mischievous, might slip away while I was dreaming and fail to return.

For a time Robert protected me, then was dependent on me, and then possessive of me. His transformation was the rose of Genet, and he was pierced deeply by his blooming. I too desired to feel more of the world. Yet sometimes that desire was nothing more than a wish to go backward where our mute light spread from hanging lanterns with mirrored panels. We had ventured out like Maeterlinck's children seeking the bluebird and were caught in the twisted briars of our new experiences.

one candidate desperately shovels money down a pit, and the other builds empty edifices in his own name,

I came to experience a different kind of prayer, a silent one, requiring more listening than speaking.

Saíamos para caminhar à noite. Às vezes conseguíamos enxergar Vênus acima de nós. Era a estrela dos pastores e a estrela do amor.

Perhaps to satisfy my curiosity, my mother enrolled me in Sunday school. We were taught by rote, Bible verses and the words of Jesus. Afterward we stood in line and were rewarded with a spoonful of comb honey. There was only one spoon in the jar to serve many coughing children. I instinctively shied from the spoon but I swiftly accepted the notion of God. It pleased me to imagine a presence above us, in continual motion, like liquid stars.

Risos. Ingrediente essencial da sobrevivência. E nós ríamos muito.

me and a score of slackers, comfortably isolated from the world, attaining our own brand of holiday well-being, no gifts, no Christ child, no tinsel or mistletoe, only a sense of complete freedom.