Devotion
Patti Smith
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Why do we write? A chorus erupts. Because we cannot simply live.”
“We would all like to believe that we came from nowhere but ourselves, every gesture is our own. But then we find we belong to the history and fate of a long line of beings that also may have wished to be free.”
“Why is one compelled to write? To set oneself apart, cocooned, rapt in solitude, despite the wants of others. Virginia Woolf had her room. Proust his shuttered windows. Marguerite Duras her muted house. Dylan Thomas his modest shed. All seeking an emptiness to imbue with words. The words that will penetrate virgin territory, crack unclaimed combinations, articulate the infinite. The words that formed Lolita, The Lover, Our Lady of the Flowers.”
“Tearing things apart (is) a powerful aspect of human nature.”
“I climb the side of a volcano carved from ice, heat drawn from the well of devotion that is the female heart.”
“..slowly I discerned a familiar shift in my concentration. That compulsion that prohibits me from completely surrendering to a work of art, drawing me from the halls of a favored museum to my own drafting table. Pressing me to close Songs of Innocence in order to experience, as Blake, a glimpse of the divine that may also become a poem. That is the decisive power of a singular work:a call to action. And I, time and again, am overcome with the hubris to believe I can answer that call”
“Some things melt before they become memories.”
“The priest had been kind but could not draw her out. Instead she chose to tell her story in the greater church, the green cathedral that is nature. For nature too is holy, more holy than the icons, more holy than the relics of saints. These were dead things compared to the most insignificant living thing. The fox knows this, and the deer, and the pine.”
“When does it cease to be something beautiful, a faithful aspect of the heart, to become off-center, slightly off the axis, and then hurled into an obsessional void?”
“Fate has a hand but is not the hand.”
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Book Keywords:
inspiration, devotion, recall, deconstruction, love, family, recollection, life, human-nature, obsession, uniqueness-of-individual, writing, patti-smith, misremembering, poetry, destruction, memory, freedom
