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
Usually when I go to a place for the first time, unless there's something historical or spectacular that nature has to offer, the first thing I like to do is see what's on the minds of the people.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Understanding people's thoughts is often more valuable than the sights themselves.
In this quote, Patti Smith expresses a preference for engaging with the local population to grasp their thoughts and feelings over merely admiring the physical sights of a new place. This highlights the importance of human connection and the insights that can be gained from interpersonal interactions, emphasizing that the essence of a place often lies within the perspectives and experiences of its inhabitants.
Themes
PeopleThoughtsUnderstandingRelationshipsCultural Insights
In practice
Example use cases
In a travel blog discussing the value of local interactions over tourist attractions.
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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