Quotes from M Train

“Nothing can be truly replicated. Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone?”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“In time we often become one with those we once failed to understand.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“I’m sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“Not all dreams need to be realized.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“I had read it some time ago but was so completely immersed that I retained nothing. This has been an intermittent, lifelong enigma. Through early adolescence I sat and read for hours in a small grove of weed trees near the railroad track in Germantown. Like Gumby I would enter a book wholeheartedly and sometimes venture so deeply it was as if I were living within it. I finished many books in such a manner there, closing the covers ecstatically yet having no memory of the content by the time I returned home. This disturbed me but I kept this strange affliction to myself. I look at the covers of such books and their contents remain a mystery that I cannot bring myself to solve. Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“Just come back, I was thinking. You've been gone long enough. Just come back. I will stop traveling; I will wash your clothes.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“All I needed for the mind was to be led to new stations. All I needed for the heart was to visit a place of greater storms.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“Anxious for some permanency, I guess I needed to be reminded how temporal permanency is.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“Home is a desk. The amalgamation of a dream. Home is the cats, my books, and my work never done. All the lost things that may one day call to me, the faces of my children who will one day call to me. Maybe we can't draw flesh from reverie nor retrieve a dusty spur, but we can gather the dream itself and bring it back uniquely whole.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“I’m off balance, not sure what’s wrong. —You have misplaced joy, he said without hesitation. Without joy, we are as dead. —How do I find it again? —Find those who have it and bathe in their perfection.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“[W]ithout a doubt we sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“In my way of thinking, anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“-What is nothing? I impetuously asked.
-It is what you can see of your eyes without a mirror, was the answer.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“It’s not so easy writing about nothing.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“My great quandary was what coat to wear and which books to bring.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“We sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we thing we won't, that we are different. As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old?”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“We seek to stay present, even as the ghosts attempt to draw us away.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“If I got lost along the way I had a compass that I had found embedded in a pile of wet leaves I was kicking my way through. The compass was old and rusted but it still worked, connecting the earth and stars. It told me where I was standing and which way was west but not where I was going and nothing of my worth.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“Shard by shard we are released from the tyranny of so-called time. A curtain of purple wisteria partially conceals the entrance to a familiar garden... In a wink, a lifetime, we pass through the infinite movements of a silent overture.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“The transformation of the heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“We want thing we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment , sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“What do we do with those that can be accessed and dismissed by a channel changer, that we love no less than a nineteenth-century poet or an admired stranger or a character from the pen of Emily Brontë? What do we do when one of them commingles with our own sense of self, only to be transferred into a finite space within an on-demand portal?”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“I crossed over to Broadway and walked north to Twenty-fifth Street to the Serbian Orthadox Cathedral dedicated to Saint Seva, the patron saint of the Serbs, I stopped, as I had many times before, to visit the bust of Nikola Tesla, the patron saint of alternating current, placed outside the church like a lone sentinel. I stood as a Con Edison truck parked within eyeshot. No respect, I thought.

-And you think you have problems, he said to me.
-Oh, I'm just having trouble writing. I move back and forth between lethargy and agitation,
-A pity. Perhaps you should step inside and light a candle to Saint Seva. He calms the sea for ships,
-yeah, maybe. I'm off balance, not sure what's wrong.
-You have misplaced joy, he said without hesitation. Without joy we are as dead,
-How do I find it again?
-Find those who have it and bathe in their perfection.
-Thank you, Mr. Tesla. Is there something I can do for you?
-Yes, he said, could you move a bit to the left? You're standing in my light.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“I may not know what is in your mind, but I know how your mind works.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

“—You have misplaced joy, he said without hesitation. Without joy, we are as dead. —How do I find it again? —Find those who have it and bathe in their perfection.”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train

About the author

Popular quotes

“Like a flash of lightning Arthur Schopenhauer appeared to me and said, "The highest law is love, the love that is compassion,”
― Bohumil Hrabal, quote from Too Loud a Solitude

“If you lose your ego, you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self. Humans, however, can't live very long without some sense of a continuing story. Such stories go beyond the limited rational system (or the systematic rationality) with which you surround yourself; they are crucial keys to sharing time-experience with others.

Now a narrative is a story, not a logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. Just as surely as you breathe, you go on ceaselessly dreaming your story. And in these stories you wear two faces. You are simultaneously subject and object. You are a whole and you are a part. You are real and you are shadow. "Storyteller" and at the same time "character". It is through such multilayering of roles in our stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated individual in the world.

Yet without a proper ego nobody can create a personal narrative, any more than you can drive a car without an engine, or cast a shadow without a real physical object. But once you've consigned your ego to someone else, where on earth do you go from there?

At this point you receive a new narrative from the person to whom you have entrusted your ego. You've handed over the real thing, so what comes back is a shadow. And once your ego has merged with another ego, your narrative will necessarily take on the narrative created by that ego.

Just what kind of narrative?

It needn't be anything particularly fancy, nothing complicated or refined. You don't need to have literary ambitions. In fact, the sketchier and simpler the better. Junk, a leftover rehash will do. Anyway, most people are tired of complex, multilayered scenarios-they are a potential letdown. It's precisely because people can't find any fixed point within their own multilayered schemes that they're tossing aside their own self-identity.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

“The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, defending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is obligated to protected and encourage his particular industry; that this procedure enriches the state because the protected industry is thus able to spend more and to pay higher wages to the poor workingmen.
Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into a whole system. In fact, this has already occurred. The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, quote from The Law

“Indeed, the real question is not, “Why greatness?” but “What work makes you feel compelled to try to create greatness?” If you have to ask the question, “Why should we try to make it great? Isn’t success enough?” then you’re probably engaged in the wrong line of work.”
― James C. Collins, quote from Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

“When you seek power and control over other people, you waste energy. When you seek money or power for the sake of the ego, you spend energy chasing the illusion of happiness instead of enjoying happiness in the moment. When you seek money for personal gain only, you cut off the flow of energy to yourself, and interfere with the expression of nature’s intelligence. But when your actions are motivated by love, there is no waste of energy. When your actions are motivated by love, your energy multiplies and accumulates — and the surplus energy you gather and enjoy can be channeled to create anything that you want, including unlimited wealth.”
― Deepak Chopra, quote from The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.