Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Patti Smith

106. “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

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. “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

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

— Patti Smith

110. “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

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. “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

113. “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

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

— Patti Smith

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

121. “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

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

— Patti Smith

123. “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

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

— Patti Smith

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Patti Smith

128. “Friendship makes thieves of us all.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

131. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

135. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

140. “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

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

— Patti Smith

142. “My sunglasses are like my guitar.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

149. “Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.”

— Patti Smith

150. “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