patti smith. just kids

i finished reading Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids this weekend. it has to be one of my favorite books of all time. she offers such a poetic look into her life with Robert Mapplelthorpe in a time when they were  young. inseparable. perfectly bohemian. and completely unknown. its a novel about growing up & traversing the artistic and political scenes of new york city during the late 60's and early 70's.

"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."

- on the summer of '69, Just Kids