Quotes by Painters - Page 7

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.
John Berger
My one thought is to get out of New York, to experience something genuinely American.
Henry Miller
I once started outto walk around the worldbut ended up in Brooklyn,that Bridge was too much for me.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless.
Henry Miller
Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Now the windows, blinded by the glare of the empty square, had fallen asleep. The balconies declared their emptiness to heaven; the open doorways smelt of coolness and wine.
Bruno Schulz
Summer was here again. Summer, summer, summer. I loved and hated summers. Summers had a logic all their own and they always brought something out in me. Summer was supposed to be about freedom and youth and no school and possibilities and adventure and exploration. Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
On my bedside table is a snow globe with a winterscape inside. Church, park bench, girl standing shin-deep in snow. Tip the snow globe over and a blizzard of slow snow falls over church and bench and girl. What is it about snow globes that makes them fascinating and terrifying at once?My heart lurches at the thought of the snow-globe girl waiting endlessly, with only the hope of a new snow blizzard to settle on her mantle when the next person tips her snow-globe world over. Not a gust of breeze may ruffle her skirt, not a bird may perch atop the steeple. The only way out of a snow globe is by shattering the glass dome that is its sky.
Amruta Patil
...and though death is howling at our backs and life is roaring at our faces, we can just begin to write, simply begin to write what we have to say.
Natalie Goldberg
When I walked into the house, I went in search of one of my dad's bottles. Not that they were that hard to find. He hid bottles all over the house. I knew where they all were. That was one of my hobbies, finding where my dad hid his bottles. It was my version of looking for Easter eggs. In my house, Easter lasted forever.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
his lips drink water but his heart drinks wine
E.E. Cummings
Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone.
Joni Mitchell
When a seed sprouts, it's a violent process. The skin breaks and splits in two. Something dies and something is born. Anytime you paint a strong or violent image, you may be expressing that part of yourself that's opening in order to let the new emerge.
Michele Cassou
It was difficult to anticipate—in these monsters with enormous, fantastic beaks which they opened wide immediately after birth, hissing greedily to show the backs of their throats, in these lizards with frail, naked bodies of hunchbacks—the future peacocks, pheasants, grouse or condors. Placed in cotton wool, in baskets, this dragon brood lifted blind, walleyed heads on thin necks, croaking voicelessly from their dumb throats.
Bruno Schulz
I had only to open my bedroom window, and blue air, love, and flowers entered with her”.
Marc Chagall
i will wade out till my thighs are steeped in burning flowersI will take the sun in my mouthand leap into the ripe air Alive with closed eyesto dash against darkness in the sleeping curves of my bodyShall enter fingers of smooth masterywith chasteness of sea-girls Will i complete the mystery of my fleshI will rise After a thousand yearslippingflowers And set my teeth in the silver of the moon
E.E. Cummings
I must have flowers, always, and always.
Claude Monet
who knows if the moon'sa balloon,coming out of a keen cityin the sky--filled with pretty people?( and if you and I shouldget into it,if theyshould take me and take you into their balloon,why thenwe'd go up higher with all the pretty peoplethan houses and steeples and clouds:go sailingaway and away sailing into a keen city which nobody's ever visited,wherealways it's Spring)and everyone'sin love and flowers pick themselves
E.E. Cummings
She wasn't my kind of woman and that's why, that night she was. This wine is the Blood of Christ. Brings the truth out of a woman sooner than any confession box does. Makes you trust a stranger with your life, your car keys, your best-guarded secret.
Amruta Patil
In some situations, if you say nothing, you are called dull; if you talk, you are thought impertinent and arrogant. It is hard to know what to do in this case. The question seems to be, whether your vanity or your prudence predominates.
William Hazlitt
Do you know what dead skin looks like when they take off a cast?That was my life, all that dead skin. It was strange to feel like the Ari I used to be. Except that wasn’t totally true. The Ari I used to be didn’t exist anymore. And the Ari I was becoming? He didn’t exist yet.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The most difficult thing to adjust to, apparently, is peace and contentment.
Henry Miller
If at eighty you're not a cripple or an invalid, if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin' and keepin' power. If you are young in years but already weary in spirit, already on your way to becoming an automaton, it may do you good to say to your boss - under your breath, of course - "Fuck you, Jack! you don't own me." If you can whistle up your ass, if you can be turned on by a fetching bottom or a lovely pair of teats, if you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from going sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you've got it half licked.
Henry Miller
The real question is: to whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong ? To those who can app|y it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialtsts?
John Berger
I envied these women I saw before me, their beauty still intact. Life has its revenge of life. Untimely death is the secret of eternal youth.
Shan Sa
When one has come to explore the ' instant moment ' and one has chosen to savor the delights of life, which are hidden behind the curtain of haste and superficiality, then ' mental time ' is replacing ' sequential time '. So ' here ' and ' now ' are keeping hustle and impatience in check. (" Just for a moment ")
Erik Pevernagie
Sit down right now. Give me this moment. Write whatever’s running through you. You might start with “this moment” and end up writing about the gardenia you wore at your wedding seven years ago. That’s fine. Don’t try to control it. Stay present with whatever comes up, and keep your hand moving.
Natalie Goldberg
I want to live like a poor man with lots of money.
Pablo Picasso
When love becomes a play of squirming mindgames or a tinderbox of mental conflicts, emotional benchmarks need an unremitting reset. ("Another empty room")
Erik Pevernagie
You might, without my crediting it, fall deeply in love and forever, with some warped hunchback whelped in the gutter. I should equally stop you from taking him.
Dorothy Dunnett
Once the dust of volcanic love has settled and the harshness of a new reality has become oppressive, disillusionment may have to be mended, wounds to be healed and emotional fallouts to be taken care of, mindfully ( "Is that all there is ?")
Erik Pevernagie
Emotional illiterates, who don’t recognize the sound of a broken heart, will never be able to hear the subtle vibrations of love reverberating through the rustling flora of life. ("Love as dizzy as a cathedral”)
Erik Pevernagie
We are sometimes astounded by the behavior of emotional outlaws, as they act in line with their own standards, but proceed like bulls-in-a-china-shop, create one heck of a mess in their living environment and bring about shocking disturbing dissensions, ever since their inner construction clashes with our emotional architecture. (“Disruption”)
Erik Pevernagie
I never wanted to be prominent enough to have enemies.
Rabih Alameddine
There is weakness in pretending to know more than you know or in stating less than you know.
Robert Henri
Men’s strengths go hand in hand with their weaknesses. That is why there is no such thing as an invincible warrior, and why heroes die.
Shan Sa
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.
Georgia O'Keeffe
I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.
Vincent van Gogh
Cherish your own emotions and never under-value them. We are not here to do what has already been done.
Robert Henri
Some one has defined a work of art as a “thing beautifully done.” I like it better if we cut away the adverb and preserve the word “done,” and let it stand alone in its fullest meaning. Things are not done beautifully. The beauty is an integral part of their being done.
Robert Henri
The creation of a painting takes as much trickery and premeditation as the commitment of a crime.
Edgar Degas
We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.
Pablo Picasso
Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life.
René Magritte
Before the counter-culture revolutionary Li Lian was executed in 1971 for criticising the Cultural Revolution, pour policemen pushed her face against the window of a truck, lifted her shirt and cut out her kidneys with a surgical knife,’ Mau Sen said, his face stony and white. ‘I think that removing the organs of convicts while they are still alive is too much. It completely contravenes medical ethics.’ ‘This is a dissection class, not a political meeting,’ Sun Chunlin said.
Ma Jian
The heart can get really cold if all you've known is winter.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Did you hear me, Zach? I care about you.” “Okay,” I said. “It’s okay with me that you care about me. But can we please not talk about it? Would that be okay with you?” “Yeah, that would be okay,” he said.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn't an ideal world, it should be so and painted only the ideal aspects of it - pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers . . . only foxy grandpas who played baseball with kids and boys who fished from logs and got up circuses in the back yard.
Norman Rockwell
Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
John Berger
Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Pity the nation whose people are sheep,and whose shepherds mislead them.Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.Pity the nation that raises not its voice,except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as heroand aims to rule the world with force and by torture.Pity the nation that knows no other language but its ownand no other culture but its own.Pity the nation whose breath is moneyand sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erodeand their freedoms to be washed away.My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to most people?
E.E. Cummings
When I was a boy, I used to wake up thinking that the world was ending.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
There are worst things in life than kissing boys.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.
Vincent van Gogh
What difference does it make whether your work is appreciated or not? The work will still be yours. Anyway, most of us are only appreciated after we are dead.
John Sloan
The sun doesn't just hang on one family's tree
Anchee Min
[T]he reason why Shakespeare and Pushkin were great writers was because from the time when they were boys they stood like policemen over their thoughts and didn't allow one small insincerity to creep in.
Michael D. O'Brien
If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may only study his commentators. ["On the Ignorance of the Learned"]
William Hazlitt
We occasionally see something on the stage that reminds us a
William Hazlitt
I am a Communist and my painting is Communist painting.
Pablo Picasso