Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “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

152. “And the eye became a body, the murky heart of a rose. The sinister shadow of an orchid. Or the indolent poppy balanced behind the ear of Baudelaire.”

— Patti Smith

153. “You know, the dreams you had for me weren’t my dreams,” he said. “Maybe those dreamsare meant for you.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

156. “The issue of gender was never my biggest concern; my biggest concern was doing good work. When the feminist movement really got going, I wasn’t an active part of it because I was more concerned with my own mental pursuits.”

— Patti Smith

157. “Anxious for some permanency, I guess I needed to be reminded how temporal permanency is.”

— Patti Smith

158. “Hail brother, the distant thunder is nothing but hearts beating as one.”

— Patti Smith

159. “A wind picked up and I could feel the sea within it.”

— Patti Smith

160. “I knew he didn’t love me, but I adored him anyway.”

— Patti Smith

161. “I’ve said this over and over, but I’ll say it a million more times – I’m concerned more about the death of a bee than I am about terrorism. Because we’re losing hives and bees by the millions because of such strong pesticides.”

— Patti Smith

162. “Well, I’m not one of those people who needs the limelight. If I’m performing, that’s what I’m doing. If I’m not, I don’t long for it. I don’t need the approval of an audience, or applause.”

— Patti Smith

163. “I don’t think the area of Jerusalem should be part of a Jewish state; it belongs to all people, to Christians and Muslims and the Jewish people.”

— Patti Smith

164. “An artist is somebody who enters into competition with God.”

— Patti Smith

165. “Friendship makes thieves of us all.”

— Patti Smith

166. “I feel about politics the same way I do about religion: I find the best I can from different things.”

— Patti Smith

167. “We learned we wanted too much. We could only give from the perspective of who we were and what we had. Apart, we were able to see with even greater clarity that we didn’t want to be without each other.”

— Patti Smith

168. “Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.”

— Patti Smith

169. “Within that moment was trust, compassion, and our mutual sense of irony. He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life. We were both aware of that, I know.”

— Patti Smith

170. “In my way of thinking, anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.”

— Patti Smith

171. “Nothing is a hobby – each discipline is its own world with its own high standards. Of course, every artist has ‘minor works’ that they do, but I don’t think I have any ‘minor disciplines.’”

— Patti Smith

172. “Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.”

— Patti Smith

173. “New York is the thing that seduced me.”

— Patti Smith

174. “People say the media is feeding the public’s hunger for celebrity news, but that’s the drug pusher’s mentality. I don’t think anybody would be pining for news about Angelina Jolie’s babies if it weren’t being given to them in the first place.”

— Patti Smith

175. “I wasn’t a stranger to hard times. I used to read the Bible – well, I still do, but when I was young I read the Bible quite a bit.”

— Patti Smith

176. “If we keep our little flame alive, our first feeling of enthusiasm of who we are, without the influence or intervention of others, we will prevail.”

— Patti Smith

177. “Hung-up women can’t produce anything but mediocre art, and there ain’t no room for mediocre art.”

— Patti Smith

178. “I hated the soup and felt little for the can.”

— Patti Smith

179. “A good artist’s always got his hand in his zipper.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

181. “No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences, it reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist.”

— Patti Smith

182. “Home is a desk. The amalgamation of a dream. Home is the cats, my books, and my work never done. All the lost things that may one day call to me, the faces of my children who will one day call to me. Maybe we can’t draw flesh from reverie nor retrieve a dusty spur, but we can gather the dream itself and bring it back uniquely whole.”

— Patti Smith

183. “I felt alien my whole life, but I didn’t feel alien because of my gender. Other people made me aware of my gender.”

— Patti Smith

184. “My father’s mother was from Liverpool and she had this very beautiful English china. I only wanted to drink my cocoa out of my grandmother’s cup and saucer.”

— Patti Smith

185. “I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand, that Joplin had the last drunken throat, that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

187. “The trouble with dreaming is that we eventually wake up.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

190. “My style of performance poetry came from the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg.”

— Patti Smith

191. “Your soul was like a network of spittle.”

— Patti Smith

192. “I’m off balance, not sure what’s wrong. – You have misplaced joy, he said without hesitation. Without joy, we are as dead. – How do I find it again? – Find those who have it and bathe in their perfection.”

— Patti Smith

193. “I imagined a lot of things. That I would shine. That I’d be good. I’d dwell bareheaded on a summit turning a wheel that would turn the earth undetected, amongst the clouds, I would have some influence; be of some avail.”

— Patti Smith

194. “Through it all we held fast to the concept of the clock with no hands. Tasks were completed, sump pumps manned, sandbags piled, trees planted, shirts ironed, hems stitched, and yet we reserved the right to ignore the hands that kept on turning.”

— Patti Smith

195. “He flashed a huge smile, one of absolute joy, from a place of no beginning or end.”

— Patti Smith

196. “Will you pretend you’re my boyfriend?”

— Patti Smith

197. “New generations have unprecedented power to make great changes. Take the music business for example. The new generations have toppled the music industry by file sharing, downloading, and Myspace. Rock ‘n’ roll belongs to the people.”

— Patti Smith

198. “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

199. “I was so used to doing art that my fingers were like albino spiders. So it was just natural for me to go to a typewriter and write poetry.”

— Patti Smith

200. “The hand above turns those leaves of loves, all in all a timeless view. Each dream of life flung from paradise everlasting, ever new.”

— Patti Smith