Chiklets

“When does it cease to be something beautiful, a faithful aspect of the heart, to become off-center, slightly off the axis, and then hurled into an obsessional void?” — Patti Smith

“We would all like to believe that we came from nowhere but ourselves, every gesture is our own. But then we find we belong to the history and fate of a long line of beings that also may have wished to be free.” — Patti Smith

“We broke our mother's heart and became ourselves. We proceeded to breathe and therefore to leave, drunken, astonished, each of us a god.” — Patti Smith, Auguries of Innocence

Are we dancing again

“Allow yourself all the different things that you feel in losing somebody. You do crazy things when you lose somebody, like all of the sudden you just leave the house and buy something expensive or do something out of character. Don’t judge yourself. Let yourself be angry or let yourself not feel anything, don’t feel guilty. Just allow all of your cells and all of your being to go through it’s process. I mean, I cried more for Fred years after he died, it was like I was in such shock losing him. And I had so much responsibility and I had two young children […] so a lot of the things that I felt were more intense years later. There’s no rules and there shouldn’t be any rules. And there’s all of these phrases like, ‘time heals all wounds’, it doesn’t, don’t look to be healed. You have a sacred wound, take care of it, don’t let it get infected. But it’s not necessarily gonna heal, you just learn to live with it.”

Patti Smith at a portrait session for Le Monde 2 in Paris on February 19, 2008 by Derek Hudson