Top 400 Patti Smith Quotes (2023 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Patti Smith

107. “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

108. “It was an unexpected encounter that slowly altered the course of my life.”

— Patti Smith

109. “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

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

— Patti Smith

111. “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

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

— Patti Smith

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

123. “I always wrote like rock ‘n’ roll. And I always listen to rock ‘n’ roll as poetry.”

— Patti Smith

124. “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

125. “My sunglasses are like my guitar.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

127. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

131. “I wasn’t taking drugs or drinking. I was working and working and working. But I wasn’t writing anything.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

133. “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

134. “I always enjoyed doing transgender songs.”

— Patti Smith

135. “I was a lower middle-class kid. My family had no money. There was no room in our small house where there were already four kids, including myself, living.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

137. “There’s nothing cool about being self-destructive.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

139. “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

140. “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. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

142. “Without noticing, I slip into a light yet lingering malaise. Not a depression, more like a fascination for melancholia, which I turn in my hand as if it were a small planet, streaked in shadow, impossibly blue.”

— Patti Smith

143. “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

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

— Patti Smith

145. “My Morocco. I followed whatever train I wanted. I wrote without writing – of genies and hustlers and mythic travelers, my vagabondia. Then I would walk back home, happily.”

— Patti Smith

146. “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

147. “Without realizing it, I had said goodbye to traditional employment. I never punched a clock again. I made my own time and my own money.”

— Patti Smith

148. “What I wanted to do in rock ’n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.”

— Patti Smith

149. “Like Jean Genet, Robert was a terrible thief. Genet was caught and imprisoned for stealing rare volumes of Proust and rolls of silk from a shirt maker. Aesthetic thieves. I imagined his sense of horror and triumph as bits of Blake swirled into the sewers of New York City.”

— Patti Smith

150. “More like a fascination for melancholia, which I turn in my hand as if it were a small planet, streaked in shadow, impossibly blue.”

— Patti Smith