Patti Smith, Just Kids Quotes

In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.

We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world.

I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth

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

Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?

It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171).

Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.

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

He took twelve pictures that day.Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. "This one has the magic, " he said. When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.

There's always new stuff, that's for sure.

I paced while he slept, ricocheting like a dove skidding the lonely confines of a Joseph Cornell box.

Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself.

I wanted to cry so bad, but my tears are inside. A blindfold keeps them there. I can’t see today. Patti, I don’t know anything.

I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one

It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was.

I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.

He wrote me a note to say we would create art together and we would make it, with or without the rest of the world.

He wasn't supposed to die, ' he cried out, somewhat desperately, petulantly, like a spoiled child. But I could hear other thoughts racing between us.Neither are you.Neither am I.