Quotes from Just Kids

“No one expected me. Everything awaited me.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“Everything distracted me, but most of all myself.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“What will happen to us?" I asked. "There will always be us," he answered.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“I don't think," he insisted. "I feel.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“We went our separate ways, but within walking distance of one another.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“When we got to the part where we had to improvise an argument in a poetic language, I got cold feet. "I can't do this," I said. "I don't know what to say."

"Say anything," he said. "You can't make a mistake when you improvise."

"What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?"

"You can't," he said. "It's like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another."

In this simple exchange, Sam taught me the secret of improvisation, one that I have accessed my whole life.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“We wanted, it seemed, what we already had, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal, yet be free.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“I immersed myself in books and rock 'n' roll, the adolescent salvation ...”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“There were days, rainy gray days, when the streets of Brooklyn were worthy of a photograph, every window the lens of a Leica, the view grainy and immoble. We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed. We lay in each other's arms, still awkward but happy, exchanging breathless kisses into sleep.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“Both of them were ahead of their time, but they didn't live long enough to see the time they were ahead of.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“Paths that cross will cross again.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“What is the soul? What color is it? I suspected my soul, being mischievous, might slip away while I was dreaming and fail to return. I did my best not to fall asleep, to keep it inside of me where it belonged.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“Later he would say that the Church led him to God, and LSD led him to universe. He also said that art led him to the devil, and sex kept him with the devil.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand.
"oh, take their picture," said the woman to her bemused husband, "I think they're artists."
"Oh, go on," he shrugged. "They're just kids.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“I'm certain, as we filled down the great staircase, that I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve years-old, all arms and legs. But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“I wish I could just project everything on the paper,”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

“We never had any children," he said ruefully. "Our work was our children.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids

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“My friend was aboard Sewee, untying his vessel from an ancient sunken post.
“Ben?”
No response.
I slipped off my shoes and waded to the runabout. Pulled myself up the tiny ladder. Found Ben’s hand waiting at the rail. He effortlessly hoisted me into the boat, maneuvering my weight like it was nothing.
I sometimes forgot how strong Ben was. How warm his hands could feel.
Ben released me. Went back to coiling line.
“Are you okay?” I immediately realized it was the wrong thing to say.
“Of course I’m okay.” Gruff. Distant.
I stood watching him, unsure what to say next. Unbidden, the image of a bench sprang to mind. The two of us, huddled close. Me crying in his arms.
I felt blood rush to my face, was grateful for the concealing darkness.
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“Good.” Not looking up. “Because I don’t.”
Another awkward silence. Then Ben huffed, “You like him enough for both of us.”
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Why would Ben be jealous of Chance? After everything that spoiled boy had done to me?
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Am I?
I felt a nervous twinge in my stomach. Felt it grow.
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“Ben. I . . .” Words failed. My face grew hot.
Ben’s hands stopped moving. He stared at the deck, his long black hair fanning his face. He sucked in a breath, as if on the verge of something.”
― Kathy Reichs, quote from Terminal

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