870 Quotes by Patti Smith

We want thing we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother’s voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.

I love my little overgrown yard. And my house is wonderful. It’s everything that I need.

Not all dreams need to be realized. That was what Fred used to say. We accomplished things that no one would ever know.

I have a daughter who’s 11 years old. Maybe she’ll grow up independent and really really heavy and become a movie star and she’ll play me in my life story.

Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.

But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revalation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

Those things are forbidden, as entreating the angels with prayer. I know that very well, one cannot ask for a life, or two lives. One can only warrant the hope of an increasing potency in each man’s heart.

Americans just don’t know what being a movie star’s all about.

I’m an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.