Sofia > Sofia's Quotes

“I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.”
― Richard Siken

“And no one can ever figure out what you want,
and you won't tell them,
and you realize the person who loves you isn't the one you thought it would be,
and you don't trust him to love you in a way
you would enjoy.

And the boy who loves you the wrong way is filthy.
And the boy who loves you in the wrong way keeps weakening.
You thought if you handed over your body
he'd do something interesting.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I exist.’ In thousands of agonies — I exist. I’m tormented on the rack — but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar — I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Everything distracted me, but most of all myself.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“No one expected me. Everything awaited me.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.

- Gloria”
― Patti Smith, Patti Smith Collected Lyrics, 1970-2015: Lyrics, Reflections & Notes for the Future

“When we got to the part where we had to improvise an argument in a poetic language, I got cold feet. "I can't do this," I said. "I don't know what to say."

"Say anything," he said. "You can't make a mistake when you improvise."

"What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?"

"You can't," he said. "It's like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another."

In this simple exchange, Sam taught me the secret of improvisation, one that I have accessed my whole life.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“We wanted, it seemed, what we already had, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal, yet be free.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Paths that cross will cross again.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I have become lost to the world
In which I otherwise wasted so much time
It means nothing to me
Whether the world believes me dead
I can hardly say anything to refute it
For truly, I am no longer a part of the world.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don't, they never were.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
― Joan Didion

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”
― Joan Didion, Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations