Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to Him.”

— Patti Smith

102. “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

103. “I was superstitious. Today was a Monday; I was born on Monday. It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me.”

— Patti Smith

104. “We didn’t have to talk then, and that is real friendship. Never uncomfortable with silence, which, in its welcome form, is yet an extension of conversation.”

— Patti Smith

105. “I’m from South Jersey: The idea of eating a roll with olive oil and anchovies or some kind of sardine and drinking mint tea definitely comes from reading Paul Bowles.”

— Patti Smith

106. “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

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

— Patti Smith

108. “I got some coffee and stood looking at the sky.”

— Patti Smith

109. “Friendship makes thieves of us all.”

— Patti Smith

110. “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

111. “I was so horny in school it felt like my body was filled with electricity. I felt like I had neon bones or something.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

113. “Nothing is ever solved, Solving is an illusion. There are moments of spontaneous brightness, when the mind appears emancipated, but this is more epiphany.”

— Patti Smith

114. “I craved honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself. Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself? It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered illumination.”

— Patti Smith

115. “I never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I’m writing a poem or drawing, I’m not a female; I’m an artist.”

— Patti Smith

116. “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

117. “I’m here right now and I want now to be the greatest time.”

— Patti Smith

118. “Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?”

— Patti Smith

119. “I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side.”

— Patti Smith

120. “I’d never had people drive me around, and then all of a sudden, if a car didn’t come, I’d say, “Where’s my car?””

— Patti Smith

121. “We needed time to figure out what all of this meant, how we were going to come to terms and redefine what our love was called. I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth.”

— Patti Smith

122. “We believe we will raise the sky, we got to fly over the land, over the sea. Fate unwinds and if we die, souls arise. God, do not seize me please.”

— Patti Smith

123. “I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates...”

— Patti Smith

124. “Closure is an illusion, the winking of the eye of a storm. Nothing is completely resolved in life, nothing is perfect. The important thing is to keep living because only by living can you see what happens next.” – on Murakami’s ‘Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage’ in The New York Times.”

— Patti Smith

125. “Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.”

— Patti Smith

126. “We sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality.”

— Patti Smith

127. “The things I thought would happen didn’t. Things I never anticipated unfolded.”

— Patti Smith

128. “I have a daughter who’s 11 years old. Maybe she’ll grow up independent and really really heavy and become a movie star and she’ll play me in my life story.”

— Patti Smith

129. “Hey sister, you’re just moving too fast, you’re screwing up the quota.”

— Patti Smith

130. “I realize that people need something to believe in.”

— Patti Smith

131. “The transformation of the heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there.”

— Patti Smith

132. “The heavy scent of perfume and the red slashes of lipstick, so strong in the fifties, revolted me. For a time I resented her. She was the messenger and also the message.”

— Patti Smith

133. “Technology is 50% of rock ‘n’ roll – the magic, the art, the performance. If you don’t have good technicians and a strong road crew who are devoted and believe in you and protect you, you’re totally naked.”

— Patti Smith

134. “I was horny, but I was innocent ’cause I was a real-late bloomer and not particularly attractive. In fact, homely.”

— Patti Smith

135. “I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.”

— Patti Smith

136. “Looking back, long after his death, our way of living seems a miracle, one that could only be achieved by the silent synchronization of the jewels and gears of a common mind.”

— Patti Smith

137. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti” he said again. Whenever he said things like that, for a magical space of time, it was as if we were the only two people in the world.”

— Patti Smith

138. “We want thing we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother’s voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.”

— Patti Smith

139. “People like beauty and purity. They pretend that’s what it’s all about.”

— Patti Smith

140. “I was too curious about the future to look back.”

— Patti Smith

141. “I climb the side of a volcano carved from ice, heat drawn from the well of devotion that is the female heart.”

— Patti Smith

142. “All I’ve ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful.”

— Patti Smith

143. “One thing I like about getting older is things, your spectrum widens, your capacity for compassion widens.”

— Patti Smith

144. “Nothing can be truly replicated. Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line.”

— Patti Smith

145. “Both of them were ahead of their time, but they didn’t live long enough to see the time they were ahead of.”

— Patti Smith

146. “I love my little overgrown yard. And my house is wonderful. It’s everything that I need.”

— Patti Smith

147. “Even as a child, I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to wear red lipstick.”

— Patti Smith

148. “Not all dreams need to be realized. That was what Fred used to say. We accomplished things that no one would ever know.”

— Patti Smith

149. “I have great respect for my parents. I got such beautiful things from both of them. It doesn’t mean that we didn’t have our rough times, but they were remarkable people who were open-minded, creative and hard-working, and had great senses of humor.”

— Patti Smith

150. “I think its very important to not be afraid to experience joy in the middle of sorrow.”

— Patti Smith