19961970 > 19961970's Quotes

“Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,
that soft summer morning
round a turning in the path,
the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones,
its legs in the air like a woman in need
burning its wedding poisons
like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs,
I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound,
but I touch my body in vain to find the wound.
I am the vampire of my own heart,
one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter
who can no longer smile.
Am I dead?
I must be dead.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Maybe tranquility is the dirt under my nails. I know it's there but I never feel like digging it out.”
― Casey Renee Kiser, Gutter Kisses and a Hug on Garbage Day

“I'll put my lips up to your gun and blow, just so you'll know I can be bold once I'm shining bright.”
― Casey Renee Kiser, Gutter Kisses and a Hug on Garbage Day

“The Thing Is
to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you've held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the slit of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think , how can a body withstand this? Then you hold like life a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again

Ellen Bass”
― Bonnie Shimko, You Know What You Have To Do

“Darling, even raindrops try to wipe my teardrops but your thoughts haul out more tears from my liquid eyes and then teardrops replace raindrops...”
― Abhishek Rath

“With a ring around the rosary
And a pocket full of crosses
Ashes to ashes
They'll all fall down”
― Matthew Fitzpatrick, Monsters & Men: An Anthology

“Well I haven't fucked much with the past,
But I've fucked plenty with the future.

- Babelogue”
― Patti Smith, Patti Smith Collected Lyrics, 1970-2015

“Freedom is...the right to write the wrong words.”
― Patti Smith

“I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side.”
― patti smith, Just Kids

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

“What will happen to us?" I asked. "There will always be us," he answered.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand,
that Joplin had the last drunken throat,
that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.”
― Patti Smith

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

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

- Gloria”
― Patti Smith, Patti Smith Collected Lyrics, 1970-2015

“I believe that we, that this planet, hasn't seen its Golden Age. Everybody says its finished ... art's finished, rock and roll is dead, God is dead. Fuck that! This is my chance in the world. I didn't live back there in Mesopotamia, I wasn't there in the Garden of Eden, I wasn't there with Emperor Han, I'm right here right now and I want now to be the Golden Age ...if only each generation would realise that the time for greatness is right now when they're alive ... the time to flower is now.”
― Patti Smith

“I have loved books all my life. There is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book.”
― Patti Smith

“I don't think," he insisted. "I feel.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?”
― 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

“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

“For life is the best thing we have in this existence. And if we should desire to believe in something, it should be a beacon within. This beacon being the sun, sea, and sky, our children, our work, our companions and, most simply put, the embodiment of love.”
― Patti Smith

“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 had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I immersed myself in books and rock 'n' roll, the adolescent salvation ...”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth. For nothing is more precious than the life force and may the love of that force guide you as you go.”
― Patti Smith, Early Work 1970-1979

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

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

“Everything comes down so pasteurized
everything comes down 16 degrees
they say your amplifier is too loud
turn your amplifier down
are we high all alone on our knees
memory is just hips that swing
like a clock
the past projects fantastic scenes
tic/toc tic/toc tic/toc
fuck the clock!”
― Patti Smith, Babel

“There were days, rainy gray days, when the streets of Brooklyn were worthy of a photograph, every window the lens of a Leica, the view grainy and immoble. We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed. We lay in each other's arms, still awkward but happy, exchanging breathless kisses into sleep.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids