Portrait Quotes

I've never taken a photograph of someone and created a persona, I've just discovered what was already there.

Looking at Loh’s photographs, it is obvious that there is nothing simpler and richer than a face when stripped of all effects and affects, poses and postures, stances and pretences. The Singaporeans featured here are almostexpressionless, as if the photographer wanted to leave us clueless about them. What do their faces tell us? Why are they so familiar? Why do we feel we know this auntie that we don’t know? And this guy with the nondescript look? And this girl with no distinguishing mark? Have we met before?

Raphael Millet

In a few years, it is very likely that this series will be considered a milestone in the history of Singapore photography.

Raphael Millet

blue eyes so light that it looked like she sent them out to be bleached

James Ellroy

He'd never need a camera to remember this, and damn if he ever wanted anyone but him to see her like she was at this moment.

Kelly Moran

The portrait of my parents is a complicated one, but lovingly drawn.

Joyce Maynard

Eloquence is painted thought, and thus those who, after having painted it, add somewhat more, make a picture, not a portrait.

Blaise Pascal

Broken heart is flute.i blow into the flute & design walking portrait with empty pen

basant nayak

With lead he shaded love into the woman's eyes.

Dean Koontz

A mans manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I take my cues from the world around me and carefully paint a self-portrait that the world can’t help but accept. However, I would be much wiser to put down all such artistic notions and hold up the portrait of me painted by God simply because that is a picture at which the world can’t help but marvel.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

The missing remained missing and the portraits couldn't change that. But when Akhmed slid the finished portrait across the desk and the family saw the shape of that beloved nose, the air would flee the room, replaced by the miracle of recognition as mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, and cousin found in that nose the son, brother, nephew, and cousin that had been, would have been, could have been, and they might race after the possibility like cartoon characters dashing off a cliff, held by the certainty of the road until they looked down -- and plummeted is the word used by the youngest brother who, at the age of sixteen, is tired of being the youngest and hopes his older brother will return for many reasons, not least so he will marry and have a child and the youngest brother will no longer be youngest; that youngest brother, the one who has nothing to say about the nose because he remembers his older brother's nose and doesn't need the nose to mean what his parents need it to mean, is the one who six months later would be disappeared in the back of a truck, as his older brother was, who would know the Landfill through his blindfold and gag by the rich scent of clay, as his older brother had known, whose fingers would be wound with the electrical wires that had welded to his older brother's bones, who would stand above a mass grave his brother had dug and would fall in it as his older brother had, though taking six more minutes and four more bullets to die, would be buried an arm's length of dirt above his brother and whose bones would find over time those of his older brother, and so, at that indeterminate point in the future, answer his mother's prayer that her boys find each other, wherever they go; that younger brother would have a smile on his face and the silliest thought in his skull a minute before the first bullet would break it, thinking of how that day six months earlier, when they all went to have his older brother's portrait made, he should have had his made, too, because now his parents would have to make another trip, and he hoped they would, hoped they would because even if he knew his older brother's nose, he hadn't been prepared to see it, and seeing that nose, there, on the page, the density of loss it engendered, the unbelievable ache of loving and not having surrounded him, strong enough to toss him, as his brother had, into the summer lake, but there was nothing but air, and he'd believed that plummet was as close as they would ever come again, and with the first gunshot one brother fell within arms' reach of the other, and with the fifth shot the blindfold dissolved and the light it blocked became forever, and on the kitchen wall of his parents' house his portrait hangs within arm's reach of his older brother's, and his mother spends whole afternoons staring at them, praying that they find each other, wherever they go.

Anthony Marra

The sky was like ebony and the only illumination was the harsh white light of the central streetlamp, which cast shadows so hard it seemed you might cut yourself on them.

Jasper Fforde

…although her mouth uttered fond words, her eyes spoke only venom.

Jasper Fforde

She had large, questioning eyes that seemed to draw me in and a sense of quiet outrage that simmered just beneath the surface. More than anything, within her features, there was a streak of wild quirkiness that made her dazzlingly attractive.

Jasper Fforde

When magic through nerves and reason passes, Imagination, force, and passion will thunder. The portrait of the world is changed.

Dejan Stojanovic

This is almost always the case: A piece of art receives its f(r)ame when found offensive.

Criss Jami

The paint is drying, and time is dying. The pain is crying, lying on my back, trying to get back the time, to brushstrokes too fast, wet went dry and love went dull; now I live in a portrait I never painted.

Anthony Liccione

All my images are self-portraits, even when I'm not in them.

Nuno Roque

The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me.

Tom Carter

There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.

Charles Dickens

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.

Oscar Wilde

(The Mona Lisa), that really is the ugliest portrait I’ve seen, the only thing that supposedly makes it famous is the mystery behind it,” Katherine admitted as she remembered her trips to the Louvre and how she shook her head at the poor tourists crowding around to see a jaundiced, eyebrow-less lady that reminded her of tight-lipped Washington on the dollar bill. Surely, they could have chosen a better portrait of the First President for their currency?

E.A. Bucchianeri

We weren’t happy together but we lived in a state of easy, mild contentment. We shared everything except the stupid fucking secret hanging round your neck. I imagined tiny photographs: portraits in sepia of your parents, their faces partially obscured by goitres. Meanwhile, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year, maybe not even in a decade from now but one day: the planet would fall apart.

Jon Gresham

Portrait Quotes

Related Topics