870 Quotes by Patti Smith

I’ve lost many, many friends through natural causes, through alcohol, through drugs, through AIDS. And every time I lose a friend or a loved one, it reminds me how great life is.

I’m not saying I wasn’t flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.

All the traumas I went through separating art from writing don’t exist anymore. That’s why I love being in rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a whole life thing.

Anxious for some permanency, I guess I needed to be reminded how temporal permanency is.

That’s the one with the magic, he would say.

My father’s mother was from Liverpool and she had this very beautiful English china. I only wanted to drink my cocoa out of my grandmother’s cup and saucer.

I immersed myself in books and rock ‘n’ roll, the adolescent salvation...

Just because I’ve extricated myself from religion doesn’t mean I’m not interested in the scriptures. I look at the Bible as itself. It’s a holy book, it has incredible literature in it and beautiful poetry.

The genesis of my coat, made from fine wool, spinning backwards through the looms, onto the body of a lamb, a black sheep a bit apart from the flock, grazing on the side of a hill. A lamb opening its eyes to the clouds that resemble for a moment the woolly backs of his own kind.