Devotion Patti Smith Quotes

Why do we write? A chorus erupts. Because we cannot simply live.

We would all like to believe that we came from nowhere but ourselves, every gesture is our own. But then we find we belong to the history and fate of a long line of beings that also may have wished to be free.

Tearing things apart (is) a powerful aspect of human nature.

I climb the side of a volcano carved from ice, heat drawn from the well of devotion that is the female heart.

Some things melt before they become memories.

When does it cease to be something beautiful, a faithful aspect of the heart, to become off-center, slightly off the axis, and then hurled into an obsessional void?

Fate has a hand but is not the hand.

Why is one compelled to write? To set oneself apart, cocooned, rapt in solitude, despite the wants of others. Virginia Woolf had her room. Proust his shuttered windows. Marguerite Duras her muted house. Dylan Thomas his modest shed. All seeking an emptiness to imbue with words. The words that will penetrate virgin territory, crack unclaimed combinations, articulate the infinite. The words that formed Lolita, The Lover, Our Lady of the Flowers.

..slowly I discerned a familiar shift in my concentration. That compulsion that prohibits me from completely surrendering to a work of art, drawing me from the halls of a favored museum to my own drafting table. Pressing me to close Songs of Innocence in order to experience, as Blake, a glimpse of the divine that may also become a poem. That is the decisive power of a singular work:a call to action. And I, time and again, am overcome with the hubris to believe I can answer that call

The priest had been kind but could not draw her out. Instead she chose to tell her story in the greater church, the green cathedral that is nature. For nature too is holy, more holy than the icons, more holy than the relics of saints. These were dead things compared to the most insignificant living thing. The fox knows this, and the deer, and the pine.

I can examine how, but not why, I wrote what I did, or why I had so perversely deviated from my original path. Can one, tracking and successfully collaring a criminal, truly comprehend the criminal mind? Can we truly separate the how and the why?

It occurs to me that the young look beautiful as they sleep and the old, such as myself, look dead.

The process of boarding a plane without a book produces a wave of panic. The right book can serve as a docent of sorts, setting a tone or even altering the course of a journey.

I seldom visit people's homes, for despite the hospitality offered I often suffer a feeling of confinement or imagined pressure.

Varför skriver vi? En kör av röster väller fram. För att vi inte bara kan leva.

Ve o an düş gören herkesin kendi devirlerindekileri düşlediğini geçirmiştim aklımdan. Antik Yunan uygarlığı kendi tanrılarının düşlerini kurdu. Emily Brontë çorak arazilerin.

Most often the alchemy that produces a poem or a work of fiction is hidden within the work itself, if not embedded in the coiling ridges of the mind.

Free of all expectation or desire, she spun, and was at once the loom, the thread, the strand of gold

I felt helplessly at peace. The rain dissipated. My shoes were muddied. There was an absence of light, but not of love.

And that’s how I became Philadelphia, she wrote later in her journal. Like the city of freedom. Yet I was not free. Hunger is its own warden.

The confession booth is not wide enough to hold my sins. It is but a small boat in the center of a terrible sea.

Stirred by a chorus of sensations, she was at once liberated and trapped.

Theirs was a story that could not resolve, only unravel.

He wrote of lifting her in the air and delighting in the fact that she had his mother’s eyes, deep brown eyes that seemed to contain everything.

It cost me a lot, she was thinking, not with regret, but with pride.

But it was the work in a hall devoted to Picasso, from his harlequins to Cubism, that pierced me the most. His brutal confidence took my breath away.

A language without words, where the mind must bow to instinct

One could not help but thank the gods for apportioning Camus with a righteous and judicious pen.

A particular joy of good weather. an amiable lightness I easily succumb to.

We waltzed beneath God's point of view knowing no ending to our rendezvous we expressed such sweet vows - My Madrigal

There are stacks of notebooks that speak of years of aborted efforts, deflated euphoria, a relentless pacing of the boards. We must write, engaging in a myriad of struggles, as if breaking in a willful foal. We must write, but not without consistent effort and a measure of sacrifice: to channel the future, to revisit childhood, and to rein in the follies and horrors of the imagination for a pulsating race of readers.

Having no past we have only present and future. We would all like to believe that we came from nowhere but ourselves, every gesture is our own. But then we find we belong to the history and fate of a long line of beings that also may have wished to be free

Taxin kommer för snabbt och jag inser att jag inte har valt ut några böcker. Tanken på att stiga ombord på ett flygplan utan bok ger mig panik. Rätt bok kan vara ett slags guide, något som sätter tonen för resan eller till och med får den att byta riktning.

Varför måste man skriva? För att ställa sig vid sidan om, som i en kokong, försjunken i ensamhet, på trots mot andras behov. Virginia Woolf hade sitt rum. Proust sina stängda fönsterluckor. Marguerite Duras sitt tysta hus. Dylan Thomas sin enkla bod. Alla var de ute efter en tomhet att fylla med ord. Orden som ska tränga in i orörda marker, uppdaga oinmutade associationer, ge uttryck åt oändligheten.

...slowly I discerned a familiar shift in my concentration. That compulsion that prohibits me from completely surrendering to a work of art, drawing me from the halls of a favored museum to my own drafting table. Pressing me to close Songs of Innocence in order to experience, as blake, a glimpse of the divine that may also become a poem. That is the decisive power of a singular work:a call to action. And I, time and again, am overcome with the hubris to believe I can answer that call.

The unexpected gift suggested small hopes, a vague but promising human connection. She felt a delight but also a fear of it, for it momentarily seemed to eclipse her impatience to skate. She lived only for skating, she told herself; there was no room for anything else. Not love, school, or scraping the walls of memory. Negotiating a bouquet of confusion, the lace on her skate broke in her hand. She quickly knotted it, then unfastened the skirt of her new coat and stepped onto the ice. -I am Eugenia, she said, to no one in particular.

In the following year my father took us on a rare excursion to the Museum of Art in Philadelphia. My parents worked very hard, and taking four children on a bus to Philadelphia was exhausting and expensive. It was the only such outing we made as a family, marking the first time I came face-to-face with art. I felt a sense of physical identification with the long, languorous Modiglianis; was moved by the elegantly still subjects of Sargent and Thomas Eakins; dazzled by the light that emanated from the Impressionists. But it was the work in a hall devoted to Picasso, from his harlequins to Cubism, that pierced me the most. His brutal confidence took my breath away. My

rooms held photography and artwork by rock stars (David Byrne, Chris Stein, Alan Vega); photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe (of Patti Smith) and Nan Goldin; works by the venerable (William Burroughs and Ray Johnson); and one gallery devoted to twenty artists associated with