Patti Smith Quotes

I hate to see anybody sink. I hate to see anybody lose their dream, lose their home, something like that.

I could be hit by a Sara Lee truck tomorrow. Which is not a bad way of going: 'Richard Simmons Found in a Freeway in Pound Cake and Fudge, With a Smile on His Face.' Let's face it. We don't know anything.

One-third of our people were dangerously ill, getting worse hourly, and we felt sure of meeting the same fate, with death as our only prospect, which in such a country was much worse yet.

Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life.

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

You have friends, and they die. You have a disease, someone you care about has a disease, Wall Street people are scamming everyone, the poor get poorer, the rich get richer. That's what we're surrounded by all the time.

My father was a dreamer - my hero. He was a smart, tough guy from Poland, a cutter of lady's handbags, an old socialist-unionist who always considered himself a failure. His big line was: 'Don't end up like me.'

When I was around 25 years old, I lost everything and was a complete dirtbag.

Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy.

Tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue, and there are many who have no desire to live.

What I've learned is that there is nothing in this life that does not fail to disappoint us, even our own deaths.

It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.

After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.

I walked the streets of New York for two years begging for a job, and I couldn't get one.

I'll be dead by the time I'm forty.

Death was to be my glory, but destiny has refused it.

But the peasants - how do the peasants die?

I was homeless. I lived in a car for a couple of years. That was the worst. But nothing was worse than when I was 40 and my mom passed away. My mother was the best person I ever knew. Those were the two lowest points.

In her way, she was a hard one. Faith in any sort of natural justice was nothing but a night light; she knew of that. Whatever she did, she would end the same way with everyone does: flat on her back with a tube in her nose, wondering, "Is this all?

Bleak, dark, and piercing cold, it was a night for the well-housed and fed to draw round the bright fire, and thank God they were at home; and for the homeless starving wretch to lay him down and die. Many hunger-worn outcasts close their eyes in our bare streets at such times, who, let their crimes have been what they may, can hardly open them in a more bitter world.

At the door of life by the gate of breath, There are worse things waiting for men than death.

Death is the ultimate disappointment

All live to die, and rise to fall.

Down in Denver, all I did was die.