870 Quotes by Patti Smith

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.

Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.

I’m here right now and I want now to be the greatest time.

These things were in my mind from the first moment I entered the vocal booth. The gratitude I had for rock and roll as it pulled me through a difficult adolescence. The joy I experienced when I danced. The moral power I gleaned in taking responsibility for one’s action. – Patti Smith.

Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.

I’m certain, as we filled down the great staircase, that I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve years-old, all arms and legs. But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

I was there for these moments, but so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments.

I was never a singer; I can’t play any instruments; I had no training. Plus, I was brought up in a time when all the great rock stars were male. I didn’t have any template for what I was doing. I did what I did out of frustration and concern.

Shard by shard we are released from the tyranny of so-called time. A curtain of purple wisteria partially conceals the entrance to a familiar garden... In a wink, a lifetime, we pass through the infinite movements of a silent overture.