Quotes from Patti Smith

Se você bater no muro, não pare.

Will you take a picture? she said. I looked down at the bleak panorama and shook my head. How could I take a picture of nothing?

the signs that mock me as I go.

In the beginning was real time. A woman enters a garden that is bursting with color. She has no memory, only a burgeoning curiosity. She approaches the man. He is not curious. He stands before a tree.

A language without words, where the mind must bow to instinct

I felt a fleeting pang in my heart for I knew that innocent phase of our life had passed.

One could not help but thank the gods for apportioning Camus with a righteous and judicious pen.

Jimi Hendrix] 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.

It occurred to me, as the heavy curtains were opened and the morning light flooded the small dining area, that without a doubt we sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality.

Robert trusted in the law of empathy, by which he could, by his will, transfer himself into an object or a work of art, and thus influence the outer world. He did not feel redeemed by the work he did. He did not seek redemption. He sought to see what others did not, the projection of his imagination.

We waltzed beneath God's point of view knowing no ending to our rendezvous we expressed such sweet vows - My Madrigal

My love for him could not save him. His love for life could not save him. It was the first time that I truly knew he was going to die.

Inside it he inscribed a few lines of poetry, portraying us as the gypsy and the fool, one creating silence; one listening closely to the silence. In the clanging twirl of our lives, these roles would reverse many times

In the green of the hills, he saw red.' p.13

One step into a living space and one can sense the centrality of work in a life. Half-empty paper coffee cups. Half-eaten deli sandwiches. An encrusted soup bowl. Here is joy and neglect. A little mescal. A little jacking off, but mostly just work. This is how I live, I am thinking.

I finally placed where the images in my morning dream might have come from - the Battle of Shiloh in the Civil War. Thousands of young soldiers lay dead on the battleground in a peach orchard in full bloom. It was said that the blossoms fell upon them, covering them like a thin layer of fragrant snow. I wondered why I had dreamed that, but then again, why do we dream about anything?

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.

Back home I checked supplies—plenty of cat food, spaghetti, a few cans of sardines, peanut butter, and bottled water. Computer charged, candles, matches, a few flashlights, and an inbred cockiness that would eventually be challenged.

It pleased me to imagine a presence above us, in continual motion, like liquid stars.

Happily there seemed to be an actual human choosing songs with abandoned disconnect.

It's not where we are going but just that we go p.275

We weathered all things, large and small, with the same vigor.

He didn't have a religious or pious relationship with the church; it was aesthetic. The thrill of the battle between good and evil attracted him, perhaps because it mirrored his interior conflict, and revealed a line that he might yet need to cross.' p.16

Suddenly he looked up and said, "Patti, did art get us?" I looked away, not really wanting to think about it. "I don't know, Robert. I don't know." Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint.