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 get irritated with the world. I get irritated with politicians. I get very irritated with governments and with corporations, but in terms of imagination - my imagination is always fertile. I'm either thinking of my own things or constantly engaged by the things that other people do.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects frustration with societal issues while emphasizing the power of personal creativity and imagination.
Patti Smith expresses her irritation with external entities such as politicians, governments, and corporations, which can often be frustrating and disheartening. However, she finds solace in her imagination, which remains vibrant and active, allowing her to engage deeply with her own ideas and the creativity of others, highlighting that despite external turmoil, inner creativity can thrive.
Themes
ImaginationCreativityFrustrationArtPolitics
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about artistic expression, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of imagination amidst societal challenges.
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.
Patti SmithRead
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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