Patti Smith, Just Kids
"I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth"
24 Quotes
"I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth"
Patti Smith, Just Kids
"In Washington Square, one could still feel the characters of Henry James and the presence of the author himself. Entering the perimeters of the white arch, one was greeted by the sounds of bongos and acoustic guitars, protest singers, political arguments, activists leafleting, older chess players challenged by the young. This open atmosphere was something I had not experienced, simple freedom that did not seem to be oppressive to anyone."
Patti Smith, Just Kids
"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."
Patti Smith, Just Kids
"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."
Patti Smith, Just Kids
"William Burroughs was simultaneously old and young. Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer. He had a medicine chest he kept locked, but if you were in pain he would open it. He did not like to see his loved ones suffer. If you were infirm he would feed you. He’d appear at your door with a fish wrapped in newsprint and fry it up. He was inaccessible to a girl but I loved him anyway."
Patti Smith, Just Kids
"I paced while he slept, ricocheting like a dove skidding the lonely confines of a Joseph Cornell box."
Patti Smith, Just Kids
"Observing people taking in the work I had watched Robert create was an emotional experience. It had left our private world. It was what I had always wanted for him, but I felt a slight pang of possessiveness sharing it with others. Overriding that feeling was the joy of seeing Robert's face, suffused with confirmation, as he glimpsed the future he had so resolutely sought and had worked so hard to achieve."
Patti Smith, Just Kids
"Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself."
Patti Smith, Just Kids
"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."
Patti Smith, Just Kids
"Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer."
Patti Smith, Just Kids
"I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one"
Patti Smith, Just Kids
"It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171)."
Patti Smith, Just Kids
"We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity."
Patti Smith, Just Kids
"I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon realized it was a tremendous stroke of luck to end up there. We could have had a fair-seized railroad flat in the East Village for what we were paying, but to dwell in this eccentric and damned hotel provided a sense of security as well as a stellar education. The goodwill that surrounded us was proof that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children."
Patti Smith, Just Kids
"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."
Patti Smith, Just Kids
"Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply."
Patti Smith, Just Kids
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