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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.

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
Memories
Greater
Comes
Art
Respiration
Earliest
Breathing
Rhythm
Memory

More quotes by Patti Smith

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My mother had no end of tragedy in her life. She would make herself get up and take a deep breath and go out and do laundry. Hang up sheets.
Patti Smith
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We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand. oh, take their picture, said the woman to her bemused husband, I think they're artists. Oh, go on, he shrugged. They're just kids.
Patti Smith
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I'm certain, as we filled down the great staircase, that I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve years-old, all arms and legs. But 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
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First of all, anybody who has lasted 30 and went through the 60's is really a survivor.
Patti Smith
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My father came a couple of times, but he always blamed his hearing loss on my loud amplifiers. So he didn't come anymore, but I had his support.
Patti Smith
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As a child I was such an intense daydreamer I could be so gone that I had to be smacked to come back. They were really worried that I had some kind of catatonia or something because I would go so far out. Because all I wanted to do was talk to god as a child.
Patti Smith
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I have seen a lifetime of transgender people and it was hard enough being gay in the '50s and early '60s. One couldn't imagine the cruelty that trans people had to face back then.
Patti Smith
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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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Often the simplest song is the hardest to write.
Patti Smith
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Poetry is a solitary process. One does not write poetry for the masses. Poetry is a self-involved, lofty pursuit. Songs are for the people. When I'm writing a song, I imagine performing it. I imagine giving it. It's a different aspect of communication. It's for the people.
Patti Smith
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The truth is, no matter how modest Steven [Sebring] is, he was obsessed with the outcome of the film [Dream of Life]. Every single frame was important to him.
Patti Smith
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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.
Patti Smith
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Everybody's got to reclaim these thingspoetry, rock'n'roll, political activismand it's got to be done over and over again. It's like eating: you can't say,'Oh, I ate yesterday'.You have to eat again.
Patti Smith
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People need space to air out their thoughts, to have a sense of themselves - unfettered by anything.
Patti Smith
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I was always trying to pick guys up. I'd ask guys out and stuff like that. I had no pride. I was the biggest lurch at dances, waiting for the ladies' choice. I'd lunge at my prey like a baby wolf.
Patti Smith
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When you do controversial work, you're going to upset a certain amount of people.
Patti Smith
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Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn't serve anyone, and it's painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you're magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person.
Patti Smith
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Just because I've extricated myself from religion doesn't mean I'm not interested in the scriptures. I look at the Bible as itself. It's a holy book, it has incredible literature in it and beautiful poetry.
Patti Smith
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My parents had three kids right after the Second World War, and we were all sort of sickly. Then I had a fourth sibling, with very serious asthma. The medical bills... So my parents always struggled.
Patti Smith
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To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It's freedom.
Patti Smith