Explore Quotes by Patti Smith

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.

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.

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

Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph.

Much has been said about Robert, and more will be added. Young men will adopt his gait. Young girls will wear white dresses and mourn his curls. He will be condemned and adored. His excesses damned or romanticized. In the end, truth will be found in his work, the corporeal body of the artist. It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to him.

Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional.

There were days, rainy gray days, when the streets of Brooklyn were worthy of a photograph, every window the lens of a Leica, the view grainy and immobile. We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed. We lay in each other's arms, still awkward but happy, exchanging breathless kisses into sleep.

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.

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

I wish I could just project everything on the paper.

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

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.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.

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

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

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.

It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171).

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

We never had any children," he said ruefully. "Our work was our children.

Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed.