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I was so involved in my boy-rhythms that I never came to grips with the fact that I was a girl. I was twelve years old when my mother took me inside and said, You can't be outside wrestling without a T-shirt on. It was a trauma.

Patti Smith

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Patti Smith
Age: 77
Born: 1946
Born: December 30
Composer
Drawer
Guitarist
Human Rights Activist
Musician
Photographer
Poet
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Visual Artist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Patricia Lee Smith
Years
Involved
Shirt
Never
Boys
Wrestling
Came
Twelve
Fact
Shirts
Girl
Rhythm
Facts
Outside
Grips
Mother
Took
Rhythms
Without
Inside
Trauma

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Pollution is a necessary result of the inability of man to reform and transform waste.
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Art is by nature optimistic. Art is optimistic because it is alive.
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What I've always tried to do is to express the highest point of me, and rock 'n' roll is the first and the most open form created by our generation. The cool thing about it is that you get the power, you get the rhythm you can be taken over sexually, you can be taken over cerebrally it's great to look at - it's a package deal.
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Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.
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If you don't have what you need, just rock with what you've got!
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The sea is greater than us - it has its rhythm, its art. It comes with our earliest memory, of respiration, breathing in and out.
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My father was always talking about God, and I idolized my father, so I'd spend hours trying to have mental telepathy with God.
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I think that there is an air of experience and aesthetic sophistication that weaves in with the amateur aspects of the film [Dream of Life] it gives the film a certain elegance.
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I gave you a wrist watch, baby, and you wouldn't even give me the time of day.
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We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.
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New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city.
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I walk alone, assaulted it seems, by tears from heaven.
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Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.
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Everyone thinks of God as a man - you can't help it - Santa Claus was a man, therefore God has to be a man.
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Rock n' roll is dream soup, what's your brand?
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I like photographing dresses in windows. I actually wore a lot of dresses in the '70s. I like them on other people now.
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My introduction to photography and a lot of how I developed aesthetically was through '50s and early-'60s fashion magazines like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.
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When I was working on the lyrics, I thought of all the lullabies we learn as children: Away in the Manger, William Blake's lullabies. I realized that the key to lullabies is simplicity.
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My father's mother was from Liverpool and she had this very beautiful English china. I only wanted to drink my cocoa out of my grandmother's cup and saucer.
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John Coltrane, he talks to god. He starts playing his solo, he might play for 14 minutes. For 14 minutes, it seems like he's talking to god, but he always takes a hold of the melody.
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