Just Kids Quotes

“No one expected me. Everything awaited me.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Everything distracted me, but most of all myself.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“What will happen to us?" I asked. "There will always be us," he answered.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side.”
― patti smith, Just Kids

“The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I don't think," he insisted. "I feel.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“We went our separate ways, but within walking distance of one another.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“When we got to the part where we had to improvise an argument in a poetic language, I got cold feet. "I can't do this," I said. "I don't know what to say."

"Say anything," he said. "You can't make a mistake when you improvise."

"What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?"

"You can't," he said. "It's like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another."

In this simple exchange, Sam taught me the secret of improvisation, one that I have accessed my whole life.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I immersed myself in books and rock 'n' roll, the adolescent salvation ...”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Paths that cross will cross again.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“We wanted, it seemed, what we already had, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal, yet be free.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Both of them were ahead of their time, but they didn't live long enough to see the time they were ahead of.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“There were days, rainy gray days, when the streets of Brooklyn were worthy of a photograph, every window the lens of a Leica, the view grainy and immoble. We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed. We lay in each other's arms, still awkward but happy, exchanging breathless kisses into sleep.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“What is the soul? What color is it? I suspected my soul, being mischievous, might slip away while I was dreaming and fail to return. I did my best not to fall asleep, to keep it inside of me where it belonged.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand.
"oh, take their picture," said the woman to her bemused husband, "I think they're artists."
"Oh, go on," he shrugged. "They're just kids.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Patti, did art get us?'
I looked away, not really wanting to think about it. 'I don't know, Robert. I don't know.'
Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Later he would say that the Church led him to God, and LSD led him to universe. He also said that art led him to the devil, and sex kept him with the devil.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revalation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Much has been said about Robert, and more will be added. Young men will adopt his gait. Young girls will wear white dresses and mourn his curls. He will be condemned and adored. His excesses damned or romanticized. In the end, truth will be found in his work, the corporeal body of the artist. It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to him.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids