I dreamed of being a painter,...

I dreamed of being a painter, but I let the image slide into a vat of pigment and pastry-foam while I bounded from temple to junkyard in pursuit of the word. A solitary shepherdess gathering bits of wool plucked by the hand of the wind from the belly of a lamb. A noun. A nun. A red. O blue.

—Patti Smith from ‘He of the Assembly’ as quoted in The Mother Courage of Rock by Luc Sante | The New York Review of Books