Patti Smith M Train Quotes

Nothing can be truly replicated. Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line.

How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone?

In time we often become one with those we once failed to understand.

I’m sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.

I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond.

Not all dreams need to be realized.

Just come back, I was thinking. You've been gone long enough. Just come back. I will stop traveling; I will wash your clothes.

Anxious for some permanency, I guess I needed to be reminded how temporal permanency is.

All I needed for the mind was to be led to new stations. All I needed for the heart was to visit a place of greater storms.

I’m off balance, not sure what’s wrong. —You have misplaced joy, he said without hesitation. Without joy, we are as dead. —How do I find it again? —Find those who have it and bathe in their perfection.

In my way of thinking, anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.

[W]ithout a doubt we sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality.

We want thing we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment , sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow.

-What is nothing? I impetuously asked. -It is what you can see of your eyes without a mirror, was the answer.

We sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality.

It’s not so easy writing about nothing.

We seek to stay present, even as the ghosts attempt to draw us away.

Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.

I may not know what is in your mind, but I know how your mind works.

Home is a desk. The amalgamation of a dream. Home is the cats, my books, and my work never done. All the lost things that may one day call to me, the faces of my children who will one day call to me. Maybe we can't draw flesh from reverie nor retrieve a dusty spur, but we can gather the dream itself and bring it back uniquely whole.

My great quandary was what coat to wear and which books to bring.

I had read it some time ago but was so completely immersed that I retained nothing. This has been an intermittent, lifelong enigma. Through early adolescence I sat and read for hours in a small grove of weed trees near the railroad track in Germantown. Like Gumby I would enter a book wholeheartedly and sometimes venture so deeply it was as if I were living within it. I finished many books in such a manner there, closing the covers ecstatically yet having no memory of the content by the time I returned home. This disturbed me but I kept this strange affliction to myself. I look at the covers of such books and their contents remain a mystery that I cannot bring myself to solve. Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember.

The transformation of the heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there.

I wrote to give myself something to read.

Images have their way of dissolving and then abruptly returning, pulling along the joy and pain attached to them like tin cans rattling from the back of an old-fashioned wedding vehicle.

If I got lost along the way I had a compass that I had found embedded in a pile of wet leaves I was kicking my way through. The compass was old and rusted but it still worked, connecting the earth and stars. It told me where I was standing and which way was west but not where I was going and nothing of my worth.

Shard by shard we are released from the tyranny of so-called time. A curtain of purple wisteria partially conceals the entrance to a familiar garden... In a wink, a lifetime, we pass through the infinite movements of a silent overture.

Why is it that we lose the things we love, and things cavalier cling to us and will be the measure of our worth after we're gone?

But all the heart break of her heroins had not prepared her for her own.

Time to travel, to acquiesce to fate.

A wind picked up and I could feel the sea within it.

The dark stone in my heart pulsed quietly, igniting like a coal in a hearth. Who is in my heart? I wondered.

Some things are not lost but sacrificed.

Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.

—You have misplaced joy, he said without hesitation. Without joy, we are as dead. —How do I find it again? —Find those who have it and bathe in their perfection.

It was an unexpected encounter that slowly altered the course of my life.

It was February 14 and I was about to give my heart to a perfect cup of coffee.

I hate being confined, especially when it's for my own good.

He picks the lock of her dreams with her own hairpin.

Those were mystical times. An era of small pleasures.

Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.

-I love you, I whispered to all, to none. -Love not lightly, I heard him say.

Perhaps it’s not where we’re going but just that we go.

I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.

Friendship makes thieves of us all

Not all dreams need to be realized. That was what Fred used to say. We accomplished things that no one would ever know.

Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.

-What is the song about? I asked. -Death, he answered with a laugh. But don't worry, nobody dies, it is the death of love.

I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we think we won't, that we are different. As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old?

What do we do with those that can be accessed and dismissed by a channel changer, that we love no less than a nineteenth-century poet or an admired stranger or a character from the pen of Emily Brontë? What do we do when one of them commingles with our own sense of self, only to be transferred into a finite space within an on-demand portal?

May the world's small things fill her with delight.

My Morocco. I followed whatever train I wanted. I wrote without writing—of genies and hustlers and mythic travelers, my vagabondia. Then I would walk back home, happily

All doors are open to the believer. It is the lesson of the Samaritan woman at the well.

Question everything.

He flashed a huge smile, one of absolute joy, from a place of no beginning or end.

All doors are open to the believer. It is the lesson of the Samaritan woman at the well. In my sleepy state it occurred to me that if the well was a portal out, there must also be a portal in. There

And then I walked out, straight through the twilight, treading the beaten earth. There were no dust clouds, no signs of anyone, but I paid no mind. I was my own lucky hand of solitaire. The desert landscape unchanging: a long, unwinding scroll that I would one day amuse myself by filling. I'm going to remember everything and then I'm going to write it all down. An aria to a coat. A requiem for a café. That's what I was thinking, in my dream, looking down at my hands.

The genesis of my coat, made from fine wool, spinning backwards through the looms, onto the body of a lamb, a black sheep a bit apart from the flock, grazing on the side of a hill. A lamb opening its eyes to the clouds that resemble for a moment the woolly backs of his own kind.

How wonderful it would be to meet an angel, I mused, but then I immediately realised I already had. Not an archangel like Saint Michael, but my human angel from Detroit, wearing an overcoat and no hat, with lank brown hair and eyes the coler of water.

Is it time uninterrupted? Only the present comprehended? Are our thoughts nothing but passing trains, no stops, devoid of dimension, whizzing by massive posters with repeating images? Catching a fragment from a window seat, yet another fragment from the next identical frame? If I write in the present yet digress, is that still real time? Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.

How quickly it had charmed me. I imagined it transformed. A place to think, make spaghetti, brew coffee, a place to write.

The transformation of a heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there.

I dreamed I was somewhere that was also nowhere.

I felt a heat containing the colors of autumn. The dark stone in my heart pulsed quietly, igniting like a coal in a hearth. Who is in my heart? I wondered.

—What are you writing? I looked up at her, somewhat surprised. I had absolutely no idea.

I got some coffee and stood looking at the sky.

Here is joy and neglect. A little mescal. A little jacking off, but mostly just work. —This is how I live, I am thinking.

I revisit my book piles. Trying not to be sidetracked or lured into another dimension.

Yesterday’s poets are today’s detectives. They spend a life sniffing out the hundredth line, wrapping up a case, and limping exhausted into the sunset.

Every morning I got up, put on my coat and watch cap, grabbed my pen and notebook, and headed across Sixth Avenue to my café.

Thank you, I said. I have lived in my own book. One I never planned to write, recording time backwards and forwards.

There is only one directive: that the lost are found; that the thick leaves encasing the dead are parted and they are lifted into the arms of light.

More like a fascination for melancholia, which I turn in my hand as if it were a small planet, streaked in shadow, impossibly blue.

Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember.

You can never pay too much for peace of mind.

All doors are open to the believer.

How could I have nothing to read? Perhaps it wasn't a lack of a book but a lack of obsession.

My penance for barely being present in the world, not the world between the pages of books, or the layered atmosphere of my own mind, but the world that is real to others

So many moments relived, scrawled in notebooks and on paper napkins, punctuated by quantities of black coffee.

The compass was old and rusted but it still worked, connecting the earth and stars. It told me where I was standing and which way was west but not where I was going and nothing of my worth.

He is overcome with the disease of love, the drunkenness of generations past. When are we ourselves, he wonders, trudging through the snow-covered banks, his coat illuminated by moon-light.

—But we keep on going, he continued, fostering all kinds of crazy hopes. To redeem the lost, some sliver of personal revelation. It’s an addiction, like playing the slots, or a game of golf.

Spanish pilgrims travel on Camino de Santiago from monastery to monastery, collecting small medals to attach to their rosary as proof of their steps. I have stacks of Polaroids, each marking my own, that I sometimes spread out like tarots or baseball cards of an imagined celestial team.

Half-empty paper coffee cups. Half-eaten deli sandwiches. An encrusted soup bowl. Here is joy and neglect. A little mescal. A little jacking off, but mostly just work. —This is how I live, I am thinking.

I crossed over to Broadway and walked north to Twenty-fifth Street to the Serbian Orthadox Cathedral dedicated to Saint Seva, the patron saint of the Serbs, I stopped, as I had many times before, to visit the bust of Nikola Tesla, the patron saint of alternating current, placed outside the church like a lone sentinel. I stood as a Con Edison truck parked within eyeshot. No respect, I thought. -And you think you have problems, he said to me. -Oh, I'm just having trouble writing. I move back and forth between lethargy and agitation, -A pity. Perhaps you should step inside and light a candle to Saint Seva. He calms the sea for ships, -yeah, maybe. I'm off balance, not sure what's wrong. -You have misplaced joy, he said without hesitation. Without joy we are as dead, -How do I find it again? -Find those who have it and bathe in their perfection. -Thank you, Mr. Tesla. Is there something I can do for you? -Yes, he said, could you move a bit to the left? You're standing in my light.

I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we think we won’t, that we are different. As a child I thought I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old? I say to my joints, my iron-colored hair. Now I am older than my love, my departed friends. Perhaps I will live so long that the New York Public Library will be obliged to hand over the walking stick of Virginia Woolf. I would cherish it for her, and the stones in her pocket. But I would also keep on living, refusing to surrender my pen.

—I know that you are concerned about the fate of the driver, he said, but it’s out of our hands. He placed us in real jeopardy and in the end my concern was for you. —Oh, I wasn’t afraid. —Yes, he said, that’s why I was concerned.

As we headed back to Tangier we saw a shepherd guiding a camel with her calf. Rolling down the window, I called out: —What is the little one’s name? —His name is Jimi Hendrix. —Hooray, I wake from yesterday! —Inshallah! he called out.

Toys to deftly pluck up like animal crackers and deposit safely into a crate decorated with friezes of bright circus trains carrying aardvarks, dodos, swift dromedaries, baby elephants, and plastic dinosaurs. A box of mixed metaphors.

Behind her smile I could see o many other things, a catastrophic sadness. I had assisted to the selfless guardians of the unfortunate children who suffered infinite loss, their family, their homes, and nature as they had known and trusted.

Through it all we held fast to the concept of the clock with no hands. Tasks were completed, sump pumps manned, sandbags piled, trees planted, shirts ironed, hems stitched, and yet we reserved the right to ignore the hands that kept on turning.

Mommy, I said aloud, and I thought of her suddenly stopping what she was doing, often in the center of the kitchen, and invoking her own mother whom she lost when she was eleven years old. How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone?

Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.

We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother’s voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.

The cafe was empty, but the cook was unscrewing the outlet plate above my seat. I took my book into the bathroom and read while he finished. When I emerged, the cook was gone and a woman was ready to sit in my seat. - Excuse me, this is my table. - Did you reserve it? - Well, no, but it's my table. - Did you actually sit here? There's nothing on the table and you have your coat on. I stood there mutely. If this were an episode of Midsomer Murders she would surely be found strangled in a wild ravine behind an abandoned vicarage.

I have always hated loose ends... If I read a book or see a film and some seemingly insignificant thing is left unresolved, I can get remarkably unsettled, going back and forth and looking for clues or wishing I had a number to call or that I could write someone a letter. Not to complain, but just to request clarification or to answer a few questions, so I can concentrate on other things.

I have smoothed the hem of the robe of Parsifal. Watched Giotto's sheep wander from a fresco. Prayed before holy icons unveiled, surviving time. Held shavings swept from the hut of Geppetto. Unzipped a body bag and beheld the face of my brother. Witnessed the acolyte scatter petals over a dying poet. I saw the smoke of incense form the shape of my days. I saw my love return to God. I saw things as they are.

we keep on going, he continued, fostering all kinds of crazy hopes. To redeem the lost, some sliver of personal revelation. It’s an addiction, like playing the slots, or a game of golf. —It’s a lot easier to talk about nothing, I said. He didn’t outright ignore my presence, but he did fail to respond. —Well, anyway, that’s my two cents. —You’re just about to pack it in, toss the clubs in a river, when you hit your stride, the ball rolls straight in the cup, and the coins fill your inverted cap.

Not all dreams need to be realized. ... Fred finally achieved his pilot's license but couldn't afford to fly a plane. I wrote incessantly but published nothing. Through it all we held fast to the concept of the clock with no hands. Tasks were completed, sump pumps manned, sandbags piled, trees planted, shirts ironed, hems stitched, and yet we reserved the right to ignore the hands that kept on turning. Looking back, long after his death, our way of living seems a miracle, one that could only be achieved by the silent synchronization of the jewels and gears of a common mind.

One afternoon while crossing the street I noticed I was crying. But I could not identify the source of my tears. I felt a heat containing the colors of autumn. The dark stone in my heart pulsed quietly, igniting like a coal in a hearth. Who is in my heart? I wondered. I soon recognized Todd’s humorous spirit, and as I continued my walk I slowly reclaimed an aspect of him that was also myself—a natural optimism. And slowly the leaves of my life turned, and I saw myself pointing out simple things to Fred, skies of blue, clouds of white, hoping to penetrate the veil of a congenital sorrow. I saw his pale eyes looking intently into mine, trying to trap my walleye in his unfaltering gaze. That alone took up several pages that filled me with such painful longing that I fed them into the fire in my heart, like Gogol burning page by page the manuscript of Dead Souls Two. I burned them all, one by one; they did not form ash, did not go cold, but radiated the warmth of human compassion.