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
I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the power of connection and trust in overcoming loneliness.
Patti Smith's quote speaks to the profound experience of sharing a moment with someone where both individuals let go of their isolation and form a bond founded on trust. In this fleeting instance, the act of surrendering one's loneliness creates a connection that transcends personal struggles, illustrating the transformative effects of human interaction and understanding.
In practice
I used this quote in a speech about the importance of friendship at a community event.
I just do my work, and I work every day, and my ambition is just to do something better than I last did.
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 heavenβs kaleidoscope.
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.
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.
I've always felt outside of things; I've always felt different.
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.
The whites come to applaud a Negro performer just like the colored do. When you've got the respect of white and colored, you can ease a lot of things.
My grandmother and I followed my mother here, to a house a block north of Hollywood Boulevard but a million miles away from Hollywood, if you know what I mean. We would hang out behind the ropes and look at the movie stars arriving at the premieres.
The sisters and brothers that you meet give you the materials which your character uses to build itself. It is said that some people are born great, others achieve it, some have it thrust upon them. In truth, the ways in which your character is built have to do with all three of those. Those around you, those you choose, and those who choose you.
Your sweetheart calls you by another's name. His eyes linger too long on your best friend. He talks with excitement about a girl at work. And the fire catches. Jealousy - that sickening combination of possessiveness, suspicion, rage, and humiliation - can overtake your mind and threaten your very core as you contemplate your rival.
Then a strange thing happened. She turned to him and smiled, and as he saw her smile every rag of anger and hurt vanity dropped from him β as though his very moods were but the outer ripples of her own, as though emotion rose no longer in his breast unless she saw fit to pull an omnipotent controlling thread.
The key to staying together is making sure you guys like each other and need each other.
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