Quotes from Patti Smith

You see, there's a saying carved in Old English on a wooden plank on one of the oldest structures built in America. This is Tangier Island. As it goes, so do we. —Have you actually seen it? I asked. —You don't see things like that. You feel them, as in all important things; they arrive, they come into your dreams. For instance, he added slyly, you're dreaming now.

I told him that I would continue our work, our collaboration, for as long as I lived. Will you write our story? Do you want me to? You have to he said no one but you can write it. I will do it, I promised, though I knew it would be a vow difficult to keep. I love you Patti. I love you Robert. And he was wheeled away for tests and I never heard him speak again. Save for his breath, which seemed to fill his hospital room as he lay dying. (p. 287)

I was no actress; I drew no line between life and art.

I paced while he slept, ricocheting like a dove skidding the lonely confines of a Joseph Cornell box.

I wandered through Kino parlors and peered through the windows of the magnificent sprawling Grant's Raw Bar filled with men in black coats scooping up piles of fresh oysters.

You made my day, Patti,' he said as he hung up the phone. I can hear him saying that. I can hear it now.

My mother was real and her son was real. When he died she buried him. Now she is dead. Mother Courage and her children, my mother and her son. They are all stories now.

How could I have nothing to read? Perhaps it wasn't a lack of a book but a lack of obsession.

I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.

But it was the work in a hall devoted to Picasso, from his harlequins to Cubism, that pierced me the most. His brutal confidence took my breath away.

I was my own lucky hand of solitaire.

For a time we considered buying an abandoned lighthouse or a shrimp trawler. But when I found I was pregnant we headed back home to Detroit, trading one set of dreams for another.

There are two types of masterpieces. There are the classic works monstrous and divine like Moby-Dick or Withering Heights or Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus. And then there is a type wherein the writer seems to infuse living energy into words as the reader is spun, wrung, and hung out to dry.

Enfim, junto ao mar, onde Deus está em toda parte, lentamente fui me acalmando. Continuei olhando o céu. As nuvens tinham as cores de um Rafael. Uma rosa ferida. Tive a sensação de que ele próprio tinha pintado a nuvem. Você o verá. Você o conhecerá. Você verá a mão dele. Essas palavras me vieram, e eu soube que um dia veria um céu pintado pela mão de Robert.

Speak to me heart, All things renew. Hearts will mend, Round the bend. Paths that cross Cross again, Paths that cross Will cross again. - Paths that Cross

I thought about it so much I could almost enter it: the Café Nerval, a small haven where poets and travelers might find the simplicity of asylum.

handicapping heaven, searching for patterns, and a portal of probability opening up onto the meaning of life

As we headed back to Tangier we saw a shepherd guiding a camel with her calf. Rolling down the window, I called out: —What is the little one's name? —His name is Jimi Hendrix. —Hooray, I wake from yesterday! —Inshallah! he called out.

We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures.

He had told me I had nothing to worry about, but in the end I did. Yet I understood why he couldn't tell me. I think having to define his impulses and confine his identity in terms of sexuality was foreign to him. His drives toward men were consuming but I never felt loved any less. It wasn't easy for him to sever our physical ties, I knew that.

slowly I discerned a familiar shift in my concentration. That compulsion that prohibits me from completely surrendering to a work of art, drawing me from the halls of a favored museum to my own drafting table. Pressing me to close Songs of Innocence in order to experience, as blake, a glimpse of the divine that may also become a poem. That is the decisive power of a singular work:a call to action. And I, time and again, am overcome with the hubris to believe I can answer that call.

He began testing me immediately by issuing a string of obscene and racially repellent references that morphed into paranoiac conspiracy rants. - Look, you're wasting your time, I said. I can be just as repellent as you, only about different subjects.

It seemed like all of creation was mapped out above and I was drawn from the laughter of the other children into a stillness I aspired to master. Here one could hear a seed form or the soul fold like a handkerchief.

Cuándo deja algo de ser hermoso, un aspecto fiel del corazón, para convertirse en algo desviado, ligeramente apartado del eje, y después precipitarse en un vacío obsesivo?