Quotes by Painters - Page 17

Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life.
William Blake
My first memory is of light -- the brightness of light -- light all around.
Georgia O'Keeffe
We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.
Leonora Carrington
Lightness and weightiness are both linked to a philosophy of life. They are choices in life. Heaviness can be the embodiment of a sense of responsibility, the expression of maturity, the result of profound meditation or the emanation of a search for meaning in life. Weightiness, however, may also lead to a feeling of oppression, when it is felt as a burden, an unbearable burden. Then time has come to let loose and things can finally lose their gravity. ( "The unbearable heaviness of being" )
Erik Pevernagie
Rome is not outside me, but inside me.. Her feverish sweetness, her tragic countryside, her own beauty and harmony, all these are mine, for my thought and my work.
Amedeo Modigliani
I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
Pablo Picasso
The problem with my life was that it was someone else's idea.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I've looked at life from both sides now From up and down and still somehowIt's life's illusions I recallI really don't know life at all
Joni Mitchell
I have it in my head that when we’re born, God writes things down on our hearts. See, on some people’s hearts he writes happy and on some people’s hearts he writes sad and on some people’s hearts he writes crazy and on some people’s hearts he writes genius and on some people’s hearts he writes angry and on some people’s hearts he writes winner and on some people’s hearts he writes loser.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Do you think it will always be this way?”“What?”“I mean, when do we start feeling like the world belongs to us?”I wanted to tell him that the world would never belong to us. “I don't know,” I said. “Tomorrow.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
i thank You God for most this amazingday: for the leaping greenly spirits of treesand a blue true dream of sky; and for everythingwhich is natural which is infinite which is yes(i who have died am alive again today,and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birthday of life and of love and wings: and of the gaygreat happening illimitably earth)how should tasting touching hearing seeingbreathing any---lifted from the noof all nothing---human merely beingdoubt unimaginably You?(now the ears of my ears awake andnow the eyes of my eyes are opened)
E.E. Cummings
The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.
John Berger
may I be I is the only prayer
E.E. Cummings
Feeling sorry for myself was an art.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?
John Berger
I wanted to tell her happy was hard for me. But I think she already knew that.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I think the therapists around this place think that if you know yourself, then somehow you’ll be better and healthier and you’ll be able to leave this place and live out your days as a happy and loving human being. Happy. Loving. I hate those words. I’m supposed to like them. I’m supposed to want them. I don’t. Don’t like them, don’t want them. This is the way I see it: if you get to know yourself really well, you might discover that deep down inside you’re just a dirty, disgusting, and selfish piece of shit. What if my heart is all rotted out and corrupted? What about that? What am I supposed to do with that information? Just tell me that. Most of the time I get the feeling that I’m just an animal disguised as an eighteen-year-old guy. At least I’m hoping that maybe deep down inside I’m a coyote.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
A human being can only endure depression up to a certain point; when this point of saturation is reached it becomes necessary for him to discover some element of pleasure, no matter how humble or on how low a level, in his environment if he is to go on living at all. In my case these insignificant birds with their subdued colourings have provided just sufficient distraction to keep me from total despair. Each day I find myself spending longer and longer at the window watching their flights, their quarrels, their mouse-quick flutterings, their miniature feuds and alliances. Curiously enough, it is only when I am standing in front of the window that I feel any sense of security. While I am watching the birds I believe that I am comparatively immune from the assaults of life. The very indifference to humanity of these wild creatures affords me a certain safeguard. Where all else is dangerous, hostile and liable to inflict pain, they alone can do me no injury because, probably, they are not even aware of my existence. The birds are at once my refuge and my relaxation.
Anna Kavan
Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me.
Vincent van Gogh
The word in your mouth is anarchy.
Henry Miller
See, the thing about that word, Sharkey, the F-word, is that sometimes I make that word do too much work. I mean, I say that word as if it clearly articulates what I’m really feeling. And it doesn’t. It’s a shortcut.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
When words have vanished, when daily habits have extinguished emotional exchange, only killing silence remains and indifference takes over. ( "Words had disappeared" )
Erik Pevernagie
No man ever puts down what he intended to say... words... are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible.
Henry Miller
Let us speak less and say more. ( “Words flew away like birds” )
Erik Pevernagie
Words is but wind but dunts is the devil
Dorothy Dunnett
Let us use words carefully, because words can betray and kill.( "A gap of silence")
Erik Pevernagie
We'd been so sure of ourselves, but now we were lost.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
When grief impounds our thinking and eats our brains, it seeps through all the cracks of our daily living. Only the soothing wind of comforting words may counter the withering twilight and the frostiness of darkness. ("All the words he always wanted to tell her.")
Erik Pevernagie
I thought I would be understood without words.
Vincent van Gogh
Words could be like food - they felt like something in your mouth. They tasted like something.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Words are loneliness.
Henry Miller
most common people oft he market-place much prefer light literature to improving books. The problem is, that so many romances contain slanderous anecdotes about sovereigns and ministers or cast aspersions upon man’s wives and daughters so that they are packed with sex and violence. Even worse are those writers of the breeze-and-moonlight school, who corrupt the young with pornography and filth. As for books of the beauty-and-talented-scholar type, a thousand are written to a single pattern and none escapes bordering on indecency. They are filled with allusions to handsome, talented young men and beautiful, refined girls in history; but in order to insert a couple of his own love poems, the author invents stereotyped heroes and heroines with the inevitable low character to make trouble between them like a clown in a play, and makes even the slave girls talk pedantic nonsense. So all these novels are full of contradictions and absurdly unnatural.
Cao Xueqin
to hell with literaturewe want something redblooded
E.E. Cummings
Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books." (p. 5)
Rabih Alameddine
My heart was full and uplifted; it seemed that in my soul the question arose whether such things as Art, literature, science encompassed and completed life or whether there was still something in the distance which encompassed it even more completely and filled it with a far greater happiness.
Adalbert Stifter
I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I'm not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an East Asian man. I can life inside Alice Munro's skin. But I can't relate to my own mother. My body is full of sentences and moments, my heart resplendent with lovely turns of phrases, but neither is able to be touched by another.
Rabih Alameddine
Homicide is not a sin. It is sometimes a necessary violence on resistant and ossified forms of existence which have ceased to be amusing. In the interests of an important and fascinating experiment, it can even become meritorious. Here is the starting point of a new apologia for sadism.
Bruno Schulz
Words are the only things that last for ever.
William Hazlitt
I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it.
Rabih Alameddine
The responsibility of literatuure is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.
Natalie Goldberg
Tell me, Anna, if man is capable of projecting his belief onto the cosmos, isn't it possible by the same token, that he can project his unbelief onto the cosmos?
Michael D. O'Brien
Both she and I have grief enough and trouble enough, but as for regrets – neither of us have any.
Vincent van Gogh
Great beauty and youth capture our attention, excite a deep pleasure; however, why shouldn't our souls gaze at a countenance over which the years have passed? Isn't there a story there, one unknown, full of pain or beauty, which pours its reflection into the features, a story we can read with some compassion or at least get a slight hint of its meaning? The young point toward the future; the old tell of a past.
Adalbert Stifter
The dialectic case of the 'things we do', the 'things we have done' and the 'things we are going to do' has been haunting present and earlier generations. For ages people have been confronted with the soul-searching question how should I interpret the past and how do I move forward. Linguistic sayings, which were inherited from century to century, gave us a good deal of remarkable advice and moral guidance in this field : " Do what is right and let come what come may ", " Do well and fear not ", " Do well and dread no shame ".Erik Pevernagie, Never looking back again
Erik Pevernagie
By freeze-framing the image of our lifestyle, by stopping our mental clock at times and letting time flow, 'psychological' time can replace 'chronological' time and our human condition can be called into question. This opens the door to a new challenge and a new future. ( "Svp "Arrêt sur image" )
Erik Pevernagie
Espere" in Spanish, is the one word covering two meanings: "waiting" and "hoping". If life, however, offers no expectation or prospect, waiting represents time "wasted”. Waiting needs a future. If not, time is condemned to be "killed". In the event that we are lost in a gap of boredom and despair, we are driven back in a vacuum of senselessness and deadlocked in a point of nothingness. We are, so therefore, bound to watch the agony of "time". ("Waiting for a place behind the geraniums " )
Erik Pevernagie
Unexpected clashes between past and present may arouse a surge of bewilderment, but ‘time’ can be a redeemer and heal mental wreckage. Time might prove to be a dependable ally and a reliable coach to find a new inspiring sequel for the future. (“Disruption”)
Erik Pevernagie
Let us doom and gloom not creep into our day and lust for life not wither away. With the future as brother-in-arms, steps in the unknown should not frighten. ("Steps in the unknown" )
Erik Pevernagie
With cold eyes and indifferent mind the spectators regard the work. Connoissers admire the "skill" (as one admires a tightrope walker), enjoy the "quality of painting" (as one enjoys a pasty). But hungry souls go hungry away. The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures "nice" or "splendid." Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing.
Wassily Kandinsky
If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.
Marc Chagall
Tomorrow is no hazardous affair, a day like any other day: tomorrow is the result of many yesterdays and comes with a potent, cumulative effect. I am tomorrow what I chose to be yesterday and the day before. It is not possible that tomorrow I may negate and nullify everything that led me to this present moment.
Henry Miller
This was the sort of ebullience and élan I prayed for when I felt the desire to write. I used to sit down and wait for this to happen. But it never did happen- not this way. It happened afterwards, sometimes when I had left the machine and gone for a walk. Yes, suddenly it would come on, like an attack, pell-mell, from every direction, a veritable inundation, an avalanche- and there I was, helpless, miles away from the typewriter, not a piece of paper in my pocket.
Henry Miller
We must not imitate that which we seek to create.
Georges Braque
I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life, the power to create.
Vincent van Gogh
Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.
Henry Miller
Is there a recipe for making beauty? The schools give recipes, but they do not beget works that make people exclaim: " How beautiful that is!
Paul Gauguin
I have no sympathy with the belief that art is the restricted province of those who paint, sculpt, make music and verse. I hope we will come to an understanding that the material used is only incidental, that there is artist in every man; and that to him the possibility of development and of expression and the happiness of creation is as much a right and as much a duty to himself, as to any of those who work in the especially ticketed ways.
Robert Henri
The end will be what it will be. The object is intense living, fulfillment; the great happiness in creation.
Robert Henri
In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don't believe any real artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what art is?
Robert Henri
I saw an angel in the block of marble and I just chiseled until I set him free.
Michelangelo