I just do my work, and I work every day, and my ambition is just to do something better than I last did.
Patti SmithRead
Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote expresses the deep desire of an artist to create impactful work that resonates powerfully with others.
Patti Smith's quote reflects the profound passion and yearning of a creator to produce art that has the capacity to provoke powerful emotions and thoughts in others, likening great works to the ability to 'awake the dead'. It emphasizes the struggle and intensity of the creative process and the desire for one's art to leave a lasting legacy.
Themes
ArtCreationImpactPassionLegacy
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the motivations behind artistic expression.
More from Patti Smith
All quotes →My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination. This process was especially magnified within the fevers of influenza, measles, chickenpox, and mumps. I got them all and with each I was privileged with a new level of awareness. Lying deep within myself, the symmetry of a snowflake spinning above me, intensifying through my lids, I seized a most worthy souvenir, a shard of heaven’s kaleidoscope.
Patti SmithRead
For everything bad, there's a million really exciting things, whether it's someone puts out a really great book, there's a new movie, there's a new detective, the sky is unbelievably golden, or you have the best cup of coffee you ever had in your life.
Patti SmithRead
Eyeing the traffic circulating the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke-down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if not in the outside world.
Patti SmithRead
I've always felt outside of things; I've always felt different.
Patti SmithRead
No matter what anybody thinks about any of them, every record I've done has been done with the same amount of care, anguish, pain, suffering, and joy.
Patti SmithRead
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