Top 400 Patti Smith Quotes (2023 Update)
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51. “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 for prayer.”

— Patti Smith

52. “Then I read Little Women, and of course, like a lot of really young girls, I was very taken with Jo – Jo being the writer and the misfit.”

— Patti Smith

53. “When you hit a wall, just kick it in.”

— Patti Smith

54. “Polaroid by its nature makes you frugal. You walk around with maybe two packs of film in your pocket. You have 20 shots, so each shot is a world.”

— Patti Smith

55. “Sometimes you’re doing really well, then, after three or four years, everything inexplicably crashes like a house of cards and you have to rebuild it. It’s not like you get to a point where you’re all right for the rest of your life.”

— Patti Smith

56. “Everything distracted me, but most of all myself.”

— Patti Smith

57. “All doors are open to the believer. It is the lesson of the Samaritan woman at the well.”

— Patti Smith

58. “I gave you a wrist watch, baby, and you wouldn’t even give me the time of day.”

— Patti Smith

59. “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city.”

— Patti Smith

60. “I know fashion is a material thing, but we live in a material world and I love clothes.”

— Patti Smith

61. “This is what I know – Sam is dead. My brother is dead. My mother is dead. My father is dead. My husband is dead. My cat is dead. My dog, who was dead in 1957, is still dead. Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen. Maybe tomorrow.”

— Patti Smith

62. “Fate is like a secret friend that helps push you on into life.”

— Patti Smith

63. “I was there for these moments, but so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments.”

— Patti Smith

64. “We wanted, it seemed, what we already had, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal, yet be free.”

— Patti Smith

65. “I love to photograph the tools of one’s trade: Duncan Grant’s paintbrushes, the typewriter of Herman Hesse, or even my own guitar, a 1957 Fender Duo-Sonic.”

— Patti Smith

66. “Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson, Goddard, Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Greco, everybody – Paris for me was a Mecca.”

— Patti Smith

67. “Some things melt before they become memories.”

— Patti Smith

68. “When I was a teenager, I had trouble getting a boyfriend, so I imagined Arthur Rimbaud or Bob Dylan as my boyfriend.”

— Patti Smith

69. “You’re not a rock ‘n’ roll person four hours a day or even when you’re on stage. It’s become the rhythm of your whole life.”

— Patti Smith

70. “Good news doesn’t necessarily have to be a positive thing. Bringing good news is imparting hope to one’s fellow man.”

— Patti Smith

71. “I just know that young people suffer, and I also know music is one of the things that help you get through – music and friends.”

— Patti Smith

72. “Some dreams aren’t dreams at all, just another angle of physical reality.”

— Patti Smith

73. “Blessedness is within us all.”

— Patti Smith

74. “I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one’s finest work.”

— Patti Smith

75. “One of my great goals when I first started taking photographs or showing them publicly is that people might want one for over their desk. That’s my goal.”

— Patti Smith

76. “For life is the best thing we have in this existence. And if we should desire to believe in something, it should be a beacon within. This beacon being the sun, sea, and sky, our children, our work, our companions and, most simply put, the embodiment of love.”

— Patti Smith

77. “I’m not really a musician. I’m a performer and I love rock ‘n’ roll.”

— Patti Smith

78. “I longed to read everything I possibly could, and the things I read in turn produced new yearnings.”

— Patti Smith

79. “As I grew up, one of my strongest allies has been my sister.”

— Patti Smith

80. “I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth.”

— Patti Smith

81. “In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.”

— Patti Smith

82. “Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed.”

— Patti Smith

83. “I believe we all have a unique journey, whether its a journey of pure energy, if there’s any intelligence within the journey. But I think each of us have our own way of dissipating or entering a new field.”

— Patti Smith

84. “Most women writers don’t interest me because they’re hung up with being a woman, they’re hung up with being Jewish, they’re hung up with being somebody or other. Rather than just going, just spurting, just creating.”

— Patti Smith

85. “I don’t consider writing a quiet, closet act. I consider it a real physical act. When I’m home writing on the typewriter, I go crazy. I move like a monkey. I’ve wet myself, I’ve come in my pants writing.”

— Patti Smith

86. “In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one’s work caged in art’s great zoos – the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?”

— Patti Smith

87. “Pollution is a necessary result of the inability of man to reform and transform waste.”

— Patti Smith

88. “So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger.”

— Patti Smith

89. “I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know.”

— Patti Smith

90. “When I was a kid, I loved Sherlock Holmes. I’m not interested in crimes. I’m interested in the mind of the detective and his process, which to me is a lot like the artist.”

— Patti Smith

91. “The idea of redemption is always good news, even if it means sacrifice or some difficult times.”

— Patti Smith

92. “Laughter. An essential ingredient for survival. And we laughed a lot.”

— Patti Smith

93. “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. I did my best not to fall asleep, to keep it inside of me where it belonged.”

— Patti Smith

94. “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. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.”

— Patti Smith

95. “It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to Him.”

— Patti Smith

96. “I use drugs to work. I never use them to escape or for pleasure. When you turn to drugs, all you’re doing is turning inside, anyway. I only use drugs for construction. It’s like one of my architectural tools.”

— Patti Smith

97. “I want to be around a really long time. I want to be a thorn in the side of everything as long as possible.”

— Patti Smith

98. “Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?”

— Patti Smith

99. “Wisdom was a teapot, pouring from above. Desolation angels, served it up with love.”

— Patti Smith

100. “I’m a total failure at housewifery. I always have been, ’cause I daydream too much. If I start doing the dishes at one in the afternoon, I’ll still be there at six in the evening.”

— Patti Smith