Patti Smith Quotes

How late is it? How long have we been sitting here? I look at my watch – three thirty and the day is almost ending. It’s October. All those kids recently returned to classrooms with new bags and pencil cases will be looking forward to half term already. How quickly it goes. Halloween soon, then firework night. Christmas. Spring. Easter. Then there’s my birthday in May. I’ll be seventeen. How long can I stave it off? I don’t know. All I know is that I have two choices – stay wrapped in blankets and get on with dying, or get the list back together and get on with living.

Maybe this was our last summer as best friends. I feel like something's going to change now and I'm not going to be able to change it back. —Margaret

Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.

When autumn comes, it doesn't ask. It just walks in, where it left you last. And you never know, when it starts; until there's fog inside the glass around your summer heart.

I know I can't stay here forever

It's pretty strange because you have images of people in your head when you left, then you just think they're going to be the same when you come back, like time freezes. I have sisters and from the ages of 11 to 13 - it's a big change for girls.

Early youth is a baffling time.

Like everyone else, I want to go on dancing forever, but I know the day is going to come when I will have to be doing something else.

You can't be 16 forever.

I can't believe I've turned into a typical old man. I can't believe it. I was young just minutes ago.

Sometimes you feel the emotion. You think this might be my last pre-season or my last Champions League match. But, overall, those thoughts aren't important right now. But the time will soon come.

God, life changes faster than you think.

If youth is a defect, it is one we outgrow too soon.

The heroes of our youth grow old - 'the boys of summer in their ruin', in Dylan Thomas's verse - yet we seem the same.

At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.

The life of day before yesterday has departed today.

Often we want to go back to the familiar, go back to where we felt our life pause, but nothing is ever the same.

I used to love getting older.

You can't be 25 all the time.

That's the terrible thing about growing up. You lose friends. It's inevitable. It's not like it's a surprise. But it is terrible.

So I said I wanted you to stay, even though nothing could stay the same.

My house says to me, "do not leave me, for here dwells your past." And the road says to me, "Come and follow me, for I am your future." And I say to both my house and the road, "I have no past, nor have I a future. If I stay here, there is a going in my staying; and if I go there is a staying in my going. Only love and death change all things."

You can't be a 25-year-old forever.

No matter how interminable something feels, there is always, always an ending. Sometimes that's good, and sometimes it's bad; sometimes it's a matter of indifference, and sometimes it's heartbreaking, and your life is never the same thereafter.

It was inconceivable to me as a child that I would be an adult. I mean, one assumed that it would happen, but obviously it didn't happen, or if it did, it happened when your back was turned, and then suddenly you were there. So I couldn't have thought about it much.