I just do my work, and I work every day, and my ambition is just to do something better than I last did.
Patti SmithRead
I have great respect for my parents. I got such beautiful things from both of them. It doesn't mean that we didn't have our rough times, but they were remarkable people who were open-minded, creative and hard-working, and had great senses of humor.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses gratitude and admiration for the author's parents despite facing challenges.
In this quote, Patti Smith reflects on her deep respect and appreciation for her parents, acknowledging both the positive traits they embodied—such as creativity, open-mindedness, and humor—and the struggles they faced as a family. It emphasizes the complexity of familial relationships, suggesting that love and respect can endure even through difficult times, and highlights the beauty of the lessons learned from parents.
Themes
ParentsRespectFamilyGratitudeHumor
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about family values, one could reference this quote to highlight the importance of appreciating parents.
More from Patti Smith
All quotes →My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination. This process was especially magnified within the fevers of influenza, measles, chickenpox, and mumps. I got them all and with each I was privileged with a new level of awareness. Lying deep within myself, the symmetry of a snowflake spinning above me, intensifying through my lids, I seized a most worthy souvenir, a shard of heaven’s kaleidoscope.
Patti SmithRead
For everything bad, there's a million really exciting things, whether it's someone puts out a really great book, there's a new movie, there's a new detective, the sky is unbelievably golden, or you have the best cup of coffee you ever had in your life.
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Eyeing the traffic circulating the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke-down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if not in the outside world.
Patti SmithRead
I've always felt outside of things; I've always felt different.
Patti SmithRead
No matter what anybody thinks about any of them, every record I've done has been done with the same amount of care, anguish, pain, suffering, and joy.
Patti SmithRead
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