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
My son and daughter lost their father quite young, so we keep him present with us. It's just a daily practice.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of remembering loved ones even after their passing.
Patti Smith reflects on the loss of her children's father, highlighting the practice of keeping his memory alive in their daily lives. This suggests that remembrance can serve as a source of comfort and connection for those grieving, and it underscores the continuing bond between family members, despite physical absence.
Themes
MemoryLossFamilyGriefRemembrance
In practice
Example use cases
During a eulogy, one might quote this to illustrate the importance of keeping memories alive.
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.
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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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