Patti Smith Quotes

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

I'm crazy, but I'm serious. I'm sentimental, but I'm, like, really hard, too. I just want people to understand that I have all these sides inside me.

What can I say? I'm a complicated guy.

There's such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting.

I do see the good in people, but I also see the bad --- I see it in myself. I know what I'm capable of. Good and bad. It's very imnportant that we make that clear. Just because I often find a way around the darkness doesn't mean tjat I don't know it's there. (Bono)

I like to think that I'm a really strong, tough person, but I'm not. I'm a very, very needy person. I'm very insecure. I'm very impressionable. But, there is a side of me that is very put-together, very strong, very capable and very opinionated. It's the two sides of myself.

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!

I must try, however, as best I can, although I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.

I am never more myself than in my self-betrayals.

The deeper and richer a personality is, the more full it is of paradox and contradiction. It is only a shallow character who offers us no problems of contrast.

I did not succeed in everything I did. And even where it did seem I was succeeding it was not always the case. The human heart has a million facets.

...he said, with sort of a little derisive smile, "How can you walk down the street with all this stuff going on inside you?" I said, "I don't know how you can walk down the street with nothing going on inside you.

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

I am different. And I don't understand exactly how. And I don't understand just why.

at this point I meet Me face to face. I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and dearly and damnably important to Me.

I just don't like to be in my own - I'm already myself, so I don't like to be in my own - like, watch myself.

I've always seen myself for who I am, which is a lot of things.

Why shouldn't I be introspective? We dont' make sense." "Neither do Chocolate and Peanut Butter, but it somehow works." He says "Somehow the mixture of two things is genius.

Life may more than once call upon you to prove Who You Are by demonstrating an aspect of Who You Are Not.

One realizes after a long time that, actually, we are contradictory, all of us.

I would not exchange the sorrows of my heart for the joys of the multitude. And I would not have the tears that sadness makes to flow from my every part turn into laughter. I would that my life remain a tear and a smile.

The dictate of the light says: Know yourself and what you are. The dark replies, By all means, but then become afraid.

There's a part of you that you can get a hold of, and there's a part of you that you can never get a hold of, and those are opposite things. Who are you? Which one are you? You are combinations of opposites.

Someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, [is] an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow.

I'm difficult on every single level. I'm aware that I can be annoying.