"Wisdom was a teapot, pouring from above. Desolation angels, served it up with love."
Read quote
33 likes
Quote collection
Patti Smith quotes (page 2 of 23)
456 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"What will happen to us?" I asked. "There will always be us," he answered."
Read quote
32 likes
"Rock n' roll is dream soup, what's your brand?"
Read quote
30 likes
"I daydream a lot - that's how I get my ideas. If I'm sitting in a café, I'm not on my phone because I want to hear my mind. I think that those periods of small solitude that we are really losing are so important."
Read quote
30 likes
"Paths that cross will cross again"
Read quote
28 likes
"Even as a child, I knew what I didn't want. I didn't want to wear red lipstick."
Read quote
27 likes
"I have loved books all my life. There is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book."
Read quote
26 likes
"No one expected me. Everything awaited me."
Read quote
26 likes
"I think really that's just the basic Christian lesson that sometimes takes us years and years to understand - have equal concern for another human being as you have for yourself or perhaps even more concern for another human being than you have for yourself."
Read quote
26 likes
"Life is an adventure of our own design intersected by fate and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents."
Read quote
25 likes
"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."
Read quote
23 likes
"New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city."
Read quote
23 likes
"I always thought my father [influenced me most] because he was so well read, I tried to model myself on him, but really as I go through life I realise it was my mother who gave me the most valuable instructions. I didn't understand or accept it at the time. She taught me to read and to pray - two things that have really stayed with me."
Read quote
23 likes
"As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag."
Read quote
22 likes
"People say hello to me. I mean, sometimes the sanitation truck goes by and says, hey Patti."
Read quote
22 likes
"Love is an angel disguised as lust."
Read quote
20 likes
"We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand. "oh, take their picture," said the woman to her bemused husband, "I think they're artists." "Oh, go on," he shrugged. "They're just kids."
Read quote
20 likes
"My father was always talking about God, and I idolized my father, so I'd spend hours trying to have mental telepathy with God."
Read quote
20 likes
"The people have the power to redeem the work of fools. Upon the meek the graces shower, it's decreed the people rule."
Read quote
20 likes
"My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination. This process was especially magnified within the fevers of influenza, measles, chickenpox, and mumps. I got them all and with each I was privileged with a new level of awareness. Lying deep within myself, the symmetry of a snowflake spinning above me, intensifying through my lids, I seized a most worthy souvenir, a shard of heaven’s kaleidoscope."
Read quote
19 likes