Edvard Munch Quotes

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them, and that is eternity.

My subconscious is furious, medusa-like in her anger, hair flying, her hands clenched around her face like Edvard Munch's Scream.

My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different from others. My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings.

From the moment of my birth, the angels of anxiety, worry, and death stood at my side, followed me out when I played, followed me in the sun of springtime and in the glories of summer. They stood at my side in the evening when I closed my eyes, and intimidated me with death, hell, and eternal damnation. And I would often wake up at night and stare widely into the room: Am I in Hell?

The camera will never compete with the brush and palette until such time as photography can be taken to Heaven or Hell.

I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.

I felt as if there were invisible threads connecting us - I felt the invisible strands of her hair still winding around me - and thus as she disappeared completely beyond the sea - I still felt it, felt the pain where my heart was bleeding - because the threads could not be severed.

My son, Sam, at three and a half, had these keys to a set of plastic handcuffs, and one morning he intentionally locked himself out of the house. I was sitting on the couch reading the newspaper when I heard him stick his plastic keys into the doorknob and try to open the door. Then I heard him say, "Oh, shit." My whole face widened, like the guy in Edvard Munch's Scream. After a moment I got up and opened the front door. "Honey," I said, "what'd you just say?" "I said, 'Oh, shit,'" he said. "But, honey, that's a naughty word. Both of us have absolutely got to stop using it. Okay?" He hung his head for a moment, nodded, and said, "Okay, Mom." Then he leaned forward and said confidentially, "But I'll tell you why I said 'shit.'" I said Okay, and he said, "Because of the fucking keys!

The painting showed a hairless, oppressed creature with a head like an inverted pear, its hands clapped in horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vast, soundless scream. Twisted ripples of the creature's torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the air surrounding it; the man or woman, whichever it was, had become contained by its own howl. It had covered its ears against its own sound. The creature stood on a bridge and no one else was present; the creature screamed in isolation. Cut off by - or despite - its outcry.

Your face encompasses the beauty of the whole earth. Your lips, as red as ripening fruit, gently part as if in pain. It is the smile of a corpse. Now the hand of death touches life. The chain is forged that links the thousand families that are dead to the thousand generations to come.

Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder.

My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm's edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss.

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that ia eternity.

The sea – it is as incomprehensible as existence – it is incomprehensible as death – as eternal as longing.

Human fates are like planets Like a star that emerges from the dark – and meets another star – shines for a second before disappearing again into the dark – [it is] in this way – in this way a man and a woman meet – glide towards one another are illuminated in love’s flames – to then disappear in their separate directions – Only a few meet in a single large blaze – where they both can be fully united

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.

ljubav je bozhansko osecanje i svaka nova zaljubljenost obavezno u sebi nosi i senku zhalosti zbog delica sopstvenog ja koje se daruje objektu strasti.

Dark Jar Tin Zoo’s face is sallow, his cheeks sunk in, and he looks like Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” only less colorful.

On the morning of our second day, we were strolling down the Champs-Elysées when a bird shit on his head. ‘Did you know a bird’s shit on your head?’ I asked a block or two later. Instinctively Katz put a hand to his head, looked at it in horror – he was always something of a sissy where excrement was concerned; I once saw him running through Greenwood Park in Des Moines like the figure in Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ just because he had inadvertently probed some dog shit with the tip of his finger – and with only a mumbled ‘Wait here’ walked with ramrod stiffness in the direction of our hotel. When he reappeared twenty minutes later he smelled overpoweringly of Brut aftershave and his hair was plastered down like a third-rate Spanish gigolo’s, but he appeared to have regained his composure. ‘I’m ready now,’ he announced. Almost immediately another bird shit on his head. Only this time it really shit. I don’t want to get too graphic, in case you’re snacking or anything, but if you can imagine a pot of yoghurt upended onto his scalp, I think you’ll get the picture. ‘Gosh, Steve, that was one sick bird,’ I observed helpfully. Katz was literally speechless. Without a word he turned and walked stiffly back to the hotel, ignoring the turning heads of passers-by. He was gone for nearly an hour. When at last he returned, he was wearing a windcheater with the hood up. ‘Just don’t say a word,’ he warned me and strode past. He never really warmed to Paris after that.

I painted the lines and colours that affected my inner eye. I painted from memory without adding anything, without the details that I no longer saw in front of me. This is the reason for the simplicity of the painting, their obvious emptiness. I painted the impressions of my childhood, the dull colours of a forgotten day.

It is often windy here, the great sails of wind that build up over the ocean meet no obstacles and come rushing in over the land, but today it was perfectly still, the light stood motionless in the air, and all the muted colours unfolded calmly in it.

Art is as much about searching as it is about creating.

Malaise invades me as the crowd around me grows. The compromises I have made with stupidity under the pressure of circumstances rush to meet me, swimming towards me in hallucinating waves of faceless heads. Edvard Munch's famous painting, The Cry, evokes for me something I feel ten times a day. A man carried along by a crowd, which only he can see, suddenly screams out in an attempt to break the spell, to call himself back to himself, to get back inside his own skin. The tacit acknowledgments, fixed smiles, lifeless words, listlessness and humiliation sprinkled in his path suddenly surge into him, driving him out of his desires and his dreams and exploding the illusion of 'being together'. People touch without meeting; isolation accumulates but is never realized; emptiness overcomes us as the density of the crowd grows. The crowd drags me out of myself and installs thousands of little sacrifices in my empty presence. Everywhere neon signs are flashing out the dictum of Plotinus: All beings are together though each remains separate. But we only need to hold out our hands and touch one another, to raise our eyes and meet one another, and everything comes into focus, as if by magic.

In Isaac Newton’s lifetime, no more than a few thousand people had any idea what he looked like, though he was one of England’s most famous men, yet now millions of people have quite a clear idea—based on replicas of copies of rather poorly painted portraits. Even more pervasive and indelible are the smile of Mona Lisa, The Scream of Edvard Munch, and the silhouettes of various fictional extraterrestrials. These are memes, living a life of their own, independent of any physical reality. “This may not be what George Washington looked like then,” a tour guide was overheard saying of the Gilbert Stuart painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “but this is what he looks like now.” Exactly.

No creo en el arte que no nace de la necesidad del hombre de abrir su corazón.

Soon after my husband and I started living together, he learned to make noise before coming into my writing space. He learned to do this because if he didn’t I would get startled and scream. That would startle him and he would scream. It was ‘Night of the Living Dead’ meets Edvard Munch till we worked things out. When I write, especially when the writing takes off, I fall into a trancelike state in which I dream with my eyes open. This is why I write. It is the opium I crave, this entry into another state of consciousness. I used to think it meant I was a great writer, that it was proof of my 'genius.' I also used to think it meant I was a nut who zapped into hallucination as soon as her husband shut the door – ‘Diary of a Mad Housewife’ with computer. I now realize it merely means I am writing.

Untreated, a dead person’s face looks horrific, at least by our very narrow cultural expectations. Their droopy, open eyes cloud over in a vacant stare. Their mouths stretch wide like Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The color drains from their faces. These images reflect the normal biological processes of death, but they are not what a family wants to see. As part of their price lists, funeral homes generally charge anywhere from $175 to $500 for “setting the features.” That is how corpses come to look “peaceful,” “natural,” and “at rest.

In themselves pictures are beyond words, beyond concepts, beyond thought, they invoke the presence of the world on the world's terms, which also means that everything that has been thought and written in this book stops being valid the moment your gaze meets the canvas.

Io credo che ci siano tre urli fondamentali nella nostra storia recente. Il primo rappresenta la difficoltà esistenziale del mondo moderno, ed è un quadro dipinto da un nordico alla fine dell’Ottocento, Edvard Munch. Per trovare il secondo dobbiamo andare dall’altra parte della baia dove stavano quelli di Berkeley, a San Francisco, e incontrare il poeta principale della Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg: è lui ad aver scritto il poema Howl, che vuol dire «urlo», appunto. È un attacco al conformismo americano dell’epoca. E poi c’è il gol di Tardelli.

so much of what we see lies in the name; that is an apple tree, that is an elm, that is a cherry tree, that is a spruce. If we look at it for longer, we might get beneath the name and see it as a unique, singular tree and not merely as a representative of the category it belongs to. And eventually we may even be able to see what it 'is', its presence in the world. But by then we will have come to know it so well that it will seem familiar to us, which in turn creates a distance, for that's how it is with the familiar, isn't it, friends we've known for years - we no longer see them, we just note their presence, allowing it to fill the category we have created for them.

Everything else has changed and disappeared with time, but not the painting. When we stand in front of it, we realise its significance, we bring it to life, we draw it into our own time and our own reality. Art works with the living, it attempts to grasp life in time, as it is in precisely this moment, and when it succeeds, life in time becomes timeless.

My son, Sam, at three and a half, had these keys to a set of plastic handcuffs, and one morning he intentionally locked himself out of the house. I was sitting on the couch reading the newspaper when I heard him stick his plastic keys into the doorknob and try to open the door. Then I heard him say, “Oh, shit.” My whole face widened, like the guy in Edvard Munch’s Scream. After a moment I got up and opened the front door. “Honey,” I said, “what’d you just say?” “I said, ‘Oh, shit,’ ” he said. “But, honey, that’s a naughty word. Both of us have absolutely got to stop using it. Okay?” He hung his head for a moment, nodded, and said, “Okay, Mom.” Then he leaned forward and said confidentially, “But I’ll tell you why I said ‘shit.’ ” I said Okay, and he said, “Because of the fucking keys!

Finally, some of the genes identified in certain variants of schizophrenia or bipolar disease actually augment certain abilities. If the most pathological variant of a mental illness can be sifted out or discriminated from the high-functioning variants by genes or gene combinations alone, then we can hope for such a test. But it is much more likely that such a test will have inherent limits: most of the genes that cause disease in one circumstance might be the very genes that cause hyperfunctional creativity in another. As Edvard Munch put it, "[My troubles] are part of me and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and [treatment] would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings." These very "sufferings," we might remind ourselves, were responsible for one of the most iconic images of the twentieth century-of a man so immersed in a psychotic era that he could only scream a psychotic response to it.

Then we come to the works that appear in eight out of the nine art histories. They were Velazquez’s Las Meninas, one or another of the pages of the Limbourg brothers’ illuminations for Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise on the north baptistery door of the Florence cathedral, Edvard Munch’s Scream, and Theodore Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa. All are important works, and at least two, Las Meninas and Gates of Paradise, attract extravagant praise in many art histories. The others are among the finest representatives of a movement or genre—but that’s why they are shown so often, not because anyone thought they belonged at the very apex of artistic greatness. Thus the first and obvious difference between a list of art works and the index of artists: Whatever quibbles one might have with the precise ordering of a list of great artists in the Western art inventory, all the people who are near the top belong somewhere near the top. The same cannot be said of all the works of art that are near the top. The ordering of Western artists has high face validity, whereas the ordering of works of Western art does not.

Panic gripped her normally street-wise face like Edvard Munch’s scream painting.

Edvard Munch painted The Scream after having a premonition of Tinder.

The self is a work in progress, it understands itself through its memories but lives its life between them, in bits and pieces, in the present and in the past, in thoughts and emotions.

Some people believe that it was while studying the niceties of British and American spelling that the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch painted his masterpiece, ‘The Scream’.

Fuck Edvard Munch and The Scream. You're my favorite face.

A basic premise of Expressionism was that mise-en-scène - the visual space of the film (as well as of fiction, theatrical presentation, and painting) - should express the stressed psychological state of either its main character, or more universally, the culture at large. Edvard Munch's painting The Scream (1893) best exemplifies this effect, though it actually predates and influenced the Expressionist movement. This painting of a figure on a bridge, standing in front of a violent multicolored sky, hands held up in anxiety and terror, is a dominant image for the twentieth century. It encapsulates the Expressionist desire to make the world a reflection of the interior anguish it has caused.

Eminent doctors warned against Munch's Pointillist canvas, Spring Day on Karl Johan, counselling that looking at such pictures brought on spotty conditions such as acne, measles and chicken pox.

like the ghastly mouth in Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream.

Dylan, Duende, Death and Lorca Does Bob Dylan have Duende? DUENDE dancers perform moving, unique, unrepeatable performances Does Bob Dylan have duende? Do you have duende? What is duende? Duende is a Spanish word with two meanings. A duende is a goblin or a pixie that probably lives at the bottom of the garden and gives three wishes to old ladies who deserve a break. The duende was best defined by Spain’s great poet Federico García Lorca during a lecture he gave in New York in 1929 on Andalusian music known as cante jondo, or deep voice. ‘The duende,’ he said, ‘is a momentary burst of inspiration, the blush of all that is truly alive, all that the performer is creating at a certain moment.’ The difference between a good and a bad singer is that the good singer has the duende and the bad singer doesn’t. ‘There are no maps nor disciplines to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned.’ Some critics say Bob Dylan does not have a great voice. But more than any other performer since the birth of recorded music, Dylan has revealed the indefinable, spine-tingling something captured in Lorca’s interpretation of duende. ‘It is an inexplicable power of attraction, the ability to send waves of emotion through those watching and listening to them.’ ‘The duende,’ he continues, ‘resembles what Goethe called the demoniacal. It manifests itself principally among musicians and poets of the spoken word, for it needs the trembling of the moment and then a long silence.’ painting off hell by Hieronymus Bosch Hell & Hieronymus Bosch Four elements can be found in Lorca’s vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death and a dash of the diabolical. I agree with Lorca that duende manifests principally among singers, but would say that same magic may touch us when confronted by great paintings: Picasso’s Guernica, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the paintings of heaven and hell by Hieronymus Bosch. The duende is found in the bitter roots of human existence, what Lorca referred to as ‘the pain which has no explanation.’ Artists often feel sad without knowing why. They sense the cruel inevitability of fate. They smell the coppery scent of death. All artists live in a permanent state of angst knowing that what they have created could have been better. Death with Duende It is not surprising that Spain found a need for the word duende. It is the only country where death in the bullring is a national spectacle, the only nation where death is announced by the explosion of trumpets and drums. The bullring, divided in sol y sombre – the light and shade, is the perfect metaphor for life and death, a passing from the light into darkness. Every matador who ever lived had duende and no death is more profound than death in the bullring.

De mi cuerpo en descomposición crecerán flores, yo estaré en ellas, y eso es la eternidad

From my rotting body flowers shall grow and I am them and that is eternity

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

How old am I, do you think?’ Inside his head, his brain contorted roughly into something resembling Edvard Munch’s Scream portrait. ‘I’m not very good at ages,’ he said

The noise sounded demonic. It was the natural, or unnatural, soundtrack to Edvard Munch’s Scream.