Patti Smith

No one expected me. Everything awaited me

He gave it to me without hesitation and I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust

I have lived for love, I have lived for Art.

But as time passed I came to experience a different kind of prayer, a silent one, requiring more listening than speaking.

I was completely smitten by the book. I longed to read them all, and the things I read of produced new yearnings.

But the urge to express myself was my strongest desire,

I reflected on the fact that no matter how good I aspired to be, I was never going to achieve perfection.

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.

I vexed my teachers with my precocious reading ability paired with an inability to apply it to anything they deemed practical.

One by one they noted in my reports that I daydreamed far too much, was always somewhere else.