Patti Smith Year Of The Monkey Quotes

The trouble with dreaming is that we eventually wake up.

I could feel the gravitational pull of home, which when I'm home too long becomes the gravitational pull of somewhere else.

Nothing is ever solved, Solving is an illusion. There are moments of spontaneous brightness, when the mind appears emancipated, but this is more epiphany.

Nothing bothered me, not even the things that bothered me.

This is what I know - Sam is dead. My brother is dead. My mother is dead. My father is dead. My husband is dead. My cat is dead. My dog, who was dead in 1957, is still dead. Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen. Maybe tomorrow.

Some dreams aren't dreams at all, just another angle of physical reality.

Our quiet rage gives us wings, the possibility to negotiate the gears winding backwards uniting all time.

You don’t follow plots you negotiate them.

Our dreams are a second life.

Despite all efforts, February just slips away, though being a leap year there is one extra day to observe.

—There are many truths and there are many worlds, said the sign solemnly. —Yes, I said, feeling quite humbled. And you were right. I did dream, many dreams, and they were much more than dreams, as if originating from the dawn of the mind. Yes, I absolutely dreamed.

You don’t see things like that. You feel them, as in all important things; they arrive, they come into your dreams.

The act of writing in real time in order to deflect, escape, or slow it down is obviously futile yet not entirely fruitless.

Lisbon is a good city to get lost in. Mornings in cafes scribbling in yet another notebook, each blank page offering escape, the pen serving, fluid and constant. I sleep well, dream little, simply exists within an uninterrupted interlude.

I wiped the shit from my shoes again and again, still going about my business, that of being alive, the best I could.

Those things are forbidden, as entreating the angels with prayer. I know that very well, one cannot ask for a life, or two lives. One can only warrant the hope of an increasing potency in each man's heart.

I commenced with my chores, whistling an oft-forgotten tune, certain that we, as the seasons, prevail and that ten thousand years is yet a blink in the eye of a ringed planet or that of an archangel armed with a sword of glass.

A stretch of time when I was rewarded with so many mystic moments, a chunk of red chalk, a chestnut, a rusted piece of scrap metal, a nail, a flat stone shaped like an ancient tablet. Although suggesting little of the magnificent work I had seen, these objects helped inspire my newfound contentedness. I placed them with the same care as a police detective into a clean plastic bag. Evidence of an awareness of the relative value of insignificant things.

I felt connected to the modest peace offered with the fare, thinking about nothing. Just wisps of things, meaningless things, like remembering my mother once told me that Van Johnson always wore red socks, even in black and white movies.

But then everything eventually changes. It’s the way of the world. Cycles of death and resurrection, but not always in the way we imagine. For instance, we might all resurrect looking way different, wearing outfits we’d never be caught dead in.

Things are changing at a speed we never dreamed. We’ll be talking nuclear war. Pesticides will be a food group. No song birds, no wildflowers. Nothing but collapsing hives and lines of the rich getting ready to board a ship for a night on the moon.

Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen. Maybe tomorrow. A tomorrow following a whole succession of tomorrows.

I had to keep swatting flies away, but that didn't bother me. Nothing bothered me, not even the things that bothered me.

table cleared and new napkins and clean utensils laid, as if they had never been there.

one candidate desperately shovels money down a pit, and the other builds empty edifices in his own name,

and men falling like chess pieces carved from the weight of centuries of indiscretions and the slaughter of worshippers and the guns and the guns and the guns and the guns.

Will the children of the future never taste the sweetness of brotherhood?

Herkes ölür," demişti yavaş yavaş güçlerini kaybeden ellerine bakarak. "Fakat ben bunun böyle olacağını önceden tahmin edememiştim işte. Ama sorun değil. Hayatımı istediğim gibi yaşadım.

I could feel the insidious fingers of memory rustling through the underbrush like the dismembered hand of the pianist scrabbling toward Peter Lorre's throat in The Beast with Five Fingers.

I thought of Thomas Paine‘s words: these are the times that try men’s souls. Outside, the rain ceased but high winds remained. And what was truth remained the truth. It was the last day of the year of the monkey and the golden cockerel was crowing, for the insufferable yellow-haired confidence man had been sworn in, with a Bible no less, and Moses and Jesus and Buddha and Mohamed seemed somewhere else entirely.

I felt a cosmic pull in multiple directions and wondered if some idiosyncratic force field was shielding yet another field, one with a small orchard at its crux, heavy with a fruit containing an unfathomable core.

I did not ask the sign how my husband fared in whatever space was allotted to him in the universe. I did not ask the fate of Sandy. Or Sam. Those things are forbidden, as entreating the angels with prayer. I know that very well, one cannot ask for a life, or two lives. One can only warrant the hope of an increasing potency in each man’s heart.

—You see, there's a saying carved in Old English on a wooden plank on one of the oldest structures built in America. This is Tangier Island. As it goes, so do we. —Have you actually seen it? I asked. —You don't see things like that. You feel them, as in all important things; they arrive, they come into your dreams. For instance, he added slyly, you're dreaming now.

Every Saturday I would go to the library and choose my books for the week. One late-autumn morning, despite menacing clouds, I bundled up and walked as always, past the peach orchards, the pig farm and the skating rink to the fork in the road that led to our sole library. The sight of so many books never failed to excite me, rows and rows of books with multicolored spines. I’d spent an inordinate amount of time choosing my stack of books that day, with the sky growing more ominous. At first, I wasn’t worried as I had long legs and was a pretty fast walker, but then it became apparent that there was no way I was going to beat the impending storm. It grew colder, the winds picked up, followed by heavy rains, then pelting hail. I slid the books under my coat to protect them, I had a long way to go; I stepped in puddles and could feel the icy water permeate my ankle socks. When I finally reached home my mother shook her head with sympathetic exasperation, prepared a hot bath and made me go to bed. I came down with bronchitis and missed several days of school. But it had been worth it, for I had my books, among them The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, Half Magic and The Dog of Flanders. Wonderful books that I read over and over, only accessible to me through our library.

I had bad feelings about an election in the year of the monkey. Don't worry, everyone said, the majority rules. No so, I retaliated, the silent rule and it will be decided by them, those who do not vote. And who can blame them, when it's all a pack of lies, a tainted election lined in waste? A true darkening of days. All of the resources that could be used to scrape away lead from the walls of crumbling schools, to shelter the homeless, or to clean a foul river. Instead, one candidate desperately shovels money down a pit, and the other builds empty edifices in his own name, another kind of immoral waste. Nonetheless, despite the misgivings, I voted.

We greet 2020 as our constitutional moral center is being re-designed in an increasingly immoral way, governed by those professing to have a hold on Christian values yet sidestepping the core of Christianity – to love one another. Their necks turn from the suffering as they willingly follow one lacking an authentic responsiveness to a waning human condition. I had hoped for a more enlightened scenario for our new decade, imagining ceremonial panels opening, as the wings of great altarpieces on feast days, revealing 2020 as the year of perfect vision. Perhaps these expectations were naïve and yet were truly felt, just as the anguish of inequity is felt, a dark blot that will not go away.