Patti Smith citations

“But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revalation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I immersed myself in books and rock 'n' roll, the adolescent salvation…”

“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.”

“No one expected me. Everything awaited me.”

“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.”

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

“Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book."

(Acceptance speech,, November 17, 2010)”

“Freedom is… the right to write the wrong words.”

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

“What will happen to us?" I asked. "There will always be us," he answered.”

“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.”

“Jesus died
For somebody's sins
But not mine.”

“I don't think," he insisted. "I feel.”

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

“Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional.”

“We went our separate ways, but within walking distance of one another.”

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

“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.”

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

“In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth. For nothing is more precious than the life force and may the love of that force guide you as you go.”

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

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

“I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.”

“Paths that cross will cross again.”

“Later he would say that the Church led him to God, and LSD led him to universe. He also said that art led him to the devil, and sex kept him with the devil.”

“We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world.”