Patti Smith Quotes

A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.

When you're in your 20s, your 30s, even, you have - at least, I had - vast ambitions, and you sit around mooning about these things, and you're depressed, because you haven't done them. And it takes you a long time to come to the realization that if you can't be John Updike, well, then, you can't.

As a long-time registered Democrat who started voting in the year of Watergate, I resent being taken for a ride to the place where anything goes and nothing matters. And especially where nothing matters less than clear thinking and straight talk.

I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.

All my life, I've been sort of a professional optimist, full of good cheer about matters political and journalistic. I always thought I'd get older and become an unnaturally cheerful old fart. But it's not happening.

As a child, I thought, 'Once I am a grown-up, there will be no more fear, no more worries,' and it turns out that's not true.

As things mature - whether they be real estate, rock n' roll, politics, festivals, radio - there's an efficiency that develops, and with it, very often, comes some soul-crushing truths.

I actually think I'm still quite childishly optimistic in a certain way, which is maybe why I find life quite shocking.

Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.

Children are great idealists, until the stupidity of their elders puts out the fires of the aspirations.

Welcome to adulthood." Cob said. "Every child finds a day when the realize that adults can be weak and wrong just like everyone else. After that day, you are an adult. Like it or not.

I’ve always been a dreamer, have always believed in the power of love and art and loud, life-affirming rock and roll, but, for the first time, I’m starting to have doubts. Can a dream even exist in reality? Or does it turn to stone the second it leaves your mind?

Forgive me if I stare, I knew you were young, but even then I was expecting someone a little more, well, more.

I think it is hard to find happiness, as a whole, in anything. The days of tender youth are gone. I think you can be delirious in your youth, but as you get older, things happen.

Washington is the city where the big men of little towns come to be disillusioned

As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.

When I was younger, I'd wanted someone to promise me that things would work out and nothing bad would ever happen again. But I understood now that that was a child's wish. No one could promise that. No one. The grown-ups could try, but they couldn't promise, not and mean it.

When we have attained success, we see how inferior it is to the hope, yearning and enthusiasm with which we started forth in life's morning.

Stupid dreams. Even the good ones are bad, because they remind you how poorly reality measures up.

Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.

Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.

I'm not out here looking for no garbage cans to curl up in. I'm looking for the same good dreams everybody else is hoping for, but I don't see where they are. Or maybe I see where they are, but I don't see how to get there.

There comes a time, thief, when the jewels cease to sparkle, when the gold loses its luster, when the throne room becomes a prison, and all that is left is a father's love for his child.

I attended the Columbus College Of Art & Design for a little while, until I realized they didn't take cartooning very seriously.