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 never thought I was gonna live to 30.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the unpredictable nature of life and the value of embracing each moment.
Patti Smith's quote conveys a sense of surprise and gratitude at reaching the age of 30, suggesting that life is often uncertain and can take unexpected turns. It emphasizes the importance of living fully and appreciating the present, as we may not always have the assurance of a long future. This sentiment resonates with many who have faced challenges or doubts about their longevity.
In practice
During a birthday celebration, one could share this quote to highlight the joy of reaching a milestone age.
I just do my work, and I work every day, and my ambition is just to do something better than I last did.
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.
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.
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.
I've always felt outside of things; I've always felt different.
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.
When doctors tell you that you have three weeks to live, you try to live a lifetime of moments in three weeks. But you say, 'To hell with three weeks.'
What? You’d dare drink right after getting out of jail for intoxication?” That’s when you need a drink the most.
Sydney in the 1960s wasn't the exuberant multicultural metropolis it is today. Out in the city's western reaches, days passed in a sun-struck stupor. In the evenings, families gathered on their verandas waiting for the 'southerly buster' - the thunderstorm that would break the heat and leave the air cool enough to allow sleep.
The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.
Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.
I don’t want my thoughts to die with me, I want to have done something. I’m not interested in power, or piles of money. I want to leave something behind. I want to make a positive contribution - know that my life has meaning.
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