Susan Vreeland Quotes

You know, bicycling isn't just a matter of balance," I said. "it's a matter of faith. You can keep upright only by moving forward. You have to have your eyes on the goal, not the ground. I'm going to call that the Bicyclist's Philosophy of Life.

Everybody works . . . . That's what life is. Work and a little play and a lot of prayer.

A hard choice. Water or books. Hmm. One could always have wine instead.

If two people love the same thing, she reasoned, then they must love each other, at least a little, even if they never say it.

In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments.

Things that have been lost and then found are doubly precious, don't you think. People too.

He and I had a bridge that no one else traveled that made us artistic lovers, passionate without a touch of the flesh. He made me thrive, and valuing that, I could do nothing that would endanger it.

What the world calls failure, I call learning.

How love builds itself unconsciously, he thought, out of the momentous ordinary.

Work is love made plain, whether man’s work or woman’s work.

Maybe that's what love was -- walking willingly into the unknown for the sake of the other.

It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials--I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered--it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments.

That a thing made by hand, the work and thought of a single craftsman, can endure much longer than its maker, through centuries in fact, can survive natural catastrophe, neglect, and even mistreatment, has always filled me with wonder. Sometimes in museums, looking at a humble piece of pottery from ancient Persia or Pompeii, or a finely wrought page from a medieval illuminated manuscript toiled over by a nameless monk, or a primitive tool with a carved handle, I am moved to tears. The unknown life of the maker is evanescent in its brevity, but the work of his or her hands and heart remains.

No matter where life takes you,’ she said, ‘the place where you stand at any moment is holy ground.

Love is so easily bruised by the necessity of making choices.

Bicyclist's Philosophy of Life..."It's a matter of faith. You can keep upright only by moving forward. You have to have your eyes on the goal, not the ground.

In the end, it's only the moments that we have.

God taking from us and loving us at the same time by providing comforters was a kind of spiritual equanimity. It seemed a phenomenon of life how a death insinuates us into the debt of those who stand by us in trouble and console us.

No matter where life takes you...the place where you stand at any moment is holy ground. Love hard and love wide and love long, and you will find goodness in it.

At this stage of life, he'd better just lean into love, because if he fell, he feared he might break a hip.

I've come to think that if doing something simple or silly can give a person pleasure, then, by God, do it

People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her.

Amar es ponerse al cuello el nudo corredizo de la ilusión; adorar a alguien mientras pareces asfixiarte. Pero incluso el amor no correspondido, el amor fugaz, es mejor que nada.

She sat very still, listening to a stream gurgling, the breeze soughing through upper branches, the melodious kloo-klack of ravens, the nyeep-nyeep of nuthatches - all sounds chokingly beautiful. She felt she could hear the cool clean breath of growing things - fern fronds, maple leaves, white trillium petals, tree trunks, each in its rightful place.

Allowing beauty a place in the soul was a powerful antidote to the stress and strain of mortal life.

Think hard before you begin, then enter the work.

He had a thought that amused him. "Figures, still life, landscape, AND an animal! Zola, eat your hat!" he bellowed.

I remember being disappointed when Papa had shown me Caravaggio's Judith. She was completely passive while she was sawing through a man's neck. Caravaggio gave all the feeling to the man. Apparently, he couldn't imagine a woman to have a single thought. I wanted to paint her thoughts, if such a thing were possible -- determination and concentration and belief in the absolute necessity of the act. The fate of her people resting on her shoulders...

re: cutting glass..."You have to be in command of the glass, telling it where to release its hold on itself. Just like life. Otherwise it will splinter.

No one but another painter could know the delicacy required to balance the complexities, to keep reality at bay in order to remain in the innermost center of his work.

Now he knew . . . that there was nothing so vital as paying attention, and perfecting the humble offices of love.

It’s better to have a hunger and appreciation for beauty than to be merely beautiful. In the end, life is richer that way. She may learn that.

This girl, when she became a woman, would risk all, sacrifice all, overlook and endure all in order to be one with her beloved.

Overblown responsibility was a part of my preoccupation with myself.

Train yourselves by seeking and acknowledging beauty moment by moment every day of your lives," he told them. "Exercise your eyes. Take pleasure in the grace of shape and the excitement of color.

What could she possibly have done that was so heinous as to earn her a lifetime of self-mortification? No one short of a tyrant deserved such unremitting agony. I cried there with her, for her, for Eve, for sorrows past, for sorrows yet to come. I put my pencil away. It was wrong to draw live pain. If there had been an artist at Bethany, it would have been wrong to intrude his chalk or charcoal on Mary Magdalene’s weeping as she washed Jesus’ feet. Some things were too raw for art until time dulled their sharpness.

The painting showed she did not yet know that lives end abruptly, that much of living is repetition and separation, that buttons forever need re-sewing no matter how ferociously one works the thread, that nice things almost happen.

If you want to preach, young man, you ought to wear some kind of clerical costume so people would be warned. In my mind, there are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them. I hate le misérabilisme. I’m in the shining business, not the darkening business.

To feel the coolness of the blue glass, like solid pieces of the sea.

His intensity was magnetic, irresistible.

If you feel joy when you do something unselfish for him, and would just as soon do it in secret as openly, then that rings of the true metal

A woman can't stay hard when all around her is loveliness.

Things will change, Father. They must. And art can help create the change.

A moon of startling brightness rose over the rooftops, lifted on a divine, invisible thread...

life we can’t control, she thought. We must accept the cork we are and stay afl, and bob gaily when we can. She

Surely a woman, not just a painter, needs a place where she can nurture her individuality, where she can become. Pascal

Reproducing nature slavishly is not art.

The notion of lovers living together is altogether too demanding. One can be caught so unready.

Therefore, what I had been taught to fear I now embraced. Betrayal- his or mine, it didn't matter- freed me.

If, indeed, that was love, it wasn't enough.

...Thank the Lord you have a man as hardworking as Stijn. Work is love made plain, whether man's or woman's work, and you're a fool if you don't recognize it.

Poor fool, ruining his life for a piece of cloth smeared with mineral paste, for a fake, I had to tell myself, a mere curiosity.

...That I was, in fact, indifferent to my husband's indiscretions testified, to me foremost, that our love was of a tepid paleness.

Page 357 - "if the mountain was smooth, you couldn't climb it.

How easily a parent’s motive could be misconstrued by an injured child.

No need to worry. Diamonds are made under pressure, and you’re our brilliant Claire.

The heaviness of forgiveness descended the moment after I wrote the words.

To celebrate, I decorated my mess tin with a yellow dandelion blossom. It looked like the sun I so rarely see. Van Gogh would have liked it.

Find some beauty along the way.

Think of ‘à Dieu,’ madame. It’s the Provençal way to wish a person to be with God when you meet him as well as when you leave him.

No matter where life takes you...the place where you stand at any moment is holy ground. Love hard and love wide and love long, and you will find the goodness in it.

A year passes like a revolving wheel, and when the spoke of January comes round again, it finds itself in a different place. And so with pain. It does not leave us where it found us.

Oh, there had been occasions of passion, but was that love? I had a sentimental notion... that love meant one would risk all, sacrifice all, overlook and endure all in order to be one with the beloved.

To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them. —PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

She remembered wishing, one particular morning... that she might someday have someone to write to, that she could write at the end of a letter full of love and news, "As ever, your loving Magdalena Elisabeth.

Never did she succumb to the cowardice of self-pity. I had fancied love a causal adjunct and not the central turning shaft making all the parts move. I had not stood astonished before the power of its turning.

If a person loves something above all else, if he values the work of his heart and hands, then he should naturally, without hesitation, pour into it his whole soul, undivided and pure. Great art demands nothing less.

The winsome lilt of Digna humming in the garden. Her knowing, almost teasing look, not quite a smile, when she knew she had the upper hand about something, and his willing acquiescence. Her coaxing in the dark next to him - What was your favorite part of the day? - to which he'd always say, because he always thought it - now, touching you. He'd feel the lump of truth form in his throat, the swell of love in his loins. And afterward, the peace of her rhythmic breathing, steady as a Frisian clock, her simple uncomposed lullaby. Those are things he would, in some final, stretched-out moment, relive. How love builds itself unconsciously, he thought, out of the momentous ordinary.

She thought of all the people in all the paintings she had seen that day, not just Father's, in all the paintings of the world, in fact. Their eyes, the particular turn of a head, their loneliness or suffering or grief was borrowed by an artist to be seen by other people throughout the years who would never see them face to face. People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her.

At some times in our lives, our passion makes us perpetrators of hurt and loss. At other times we are the ones who are hurt—all in the name of art. Sometimes we get what we want. Sometimes we pay for another to get what he or she wants.

Her chest ached like a dull wound when she realized that her silence did not cause him a moment's reflection or curiosity. When she looked out the corner of her eye at him, she could not tell what she meant to him... Another wish that never would come true, she saw then, even if she lived forever, was that he, that someone, would look at her not as an artistic study, but with love.

She wasn't at peace the way that artist painted her. She was leaning forward, and the rigidness of her spine showed the ache in her soul. She was a desperate woman with frailties just like her, temptations just liker her, a woman who had needs, a woman who loved almost to the point of there being no more her anymore, a woman who probably cried too much, just like her, a woman afraid, wanting to believe rather than believing...

She plucked a raspberry. Sweet juice, sweet pleasure. Within the tangle of tendrils, inside a blossom, a tiny bead was kisses and blessed by the sun, from which it took in light and warmth and heaven's rain imbued with the richness of the soil of France. All of the elements of the river world helped that bead to expand and multiply into sheer casings for sweet pulp, wedge together in a knobby globe until it released its juice in her mouth

painting. Carefully, I took down the goat, the chicken, and me and

We are not botanists. We are artists. Suggest nature, but conventionalize it. Stylize it. Simplify it to its contour lines to convey structure.

Art for art’s sake, we say, because beauty blesses humanity with a better life.

Train yourselves by seeking and acknowledging beauty moment by moment every day of your lives,

Exercise your eyes. Take pleasure in the grace of shape and the excitement of color.

Be courageous with color. Let it pour out of you.

Nature is God’s work, so I say nature motifs are just as spiritual, just as inspirational, as biblical images.

Was it wrong for me to want more than constrained existence? Wrong to hunger for change, new faces, a full life? Surprises to please my eyes and ears?

I had always held the notion that if two people love the same thing, they must love each other as well, but now the memories of that love had been tarnished by betrayal.

If I don’t love the feelings I have while creating those windows, I’m only working for coin and not from soul.

What I want to do and what I have to do are always fighting each other like alley cats.

Paint a self-portrait, for our parlor. I want to see that one eyebrow permanently arched, permanently skeptical—the look of someone who doesn’t suffer prudes easily.

Has it ever occurred to you that to clutch at life fearfully, unwilling to spend it, is not a form of gratitude to God for life?” Lizzie looked at her as if pained by some bright light. “But to fling one’s whole being at a goal of interpreting God’s creation—

put herself back together again and again. She would drink the forest liquids and drench herself in possibility.

at age seventy-four, she was asked what had been the outstanding events of her life. She responded, “Work and more work! . . . loving everything terrifically. . . . The outstanding event to me is the doing—which I am still at.

God taking from us and loving us at the same time by providing comforters was a kind of spiritual equanimity. It seemed a phenomenon of life how a death insinuates us into the debt of those who stand by us in trouble and console us.

Edwin must have extended himself to this woman who the world would never know existed. His compassion for others had a strange effect on me. Every time I learned of some help he gave to someone, I felt he was giving the kindness to me.

docks—I thought of these acts as love offerings to me. Despite the time and intensity he gave to others, he made me feel that I was the vessel into which he was pouring his best self. I realized I had come to love him for his hunger to bless. The

had been at the Vanderbilt mansion in Hyde Park all week,

How does one end a moment like this? It would kill her to feel him pull away. She had to be first. In a moment. One moment more. Yes. Now

He lived so badly, it seemed, because he always came into the moment encumbered

When Constantine was told that the Roman rabble had stoned the head of his statue, he raised his hands to his head and said, ‘How remarkable. I don’t feel the least bit hurt.

Het zou me heel wat waard zijn te weten waar hij op dit moment aan dacht. Als de ene persoon zeker kon weten wat de andere persoon dacht of aan het doen was, zou eenzaamheid in de wereld misschien ophouden te bestaan.

Beelden, zijnde driedimensionale objecten in plaats van tweedimensionale schilderijen, zijn echter dan schilderijen,” zei een heer. “Daarom zijn ze in staat een bedrieglijker illusie te creëren – dat wil zeggen dat beeldhouwkunst de hoogste kunstvorm is.” “Daar ben ik het geheel mee oneens,” zei ik terwijl ik een paar stappen achter Galileo stond. Op het moment dat hij me herkende, strekte zijn glimlach zich helemaal uit tot de bult onder zijn oog. Hij opende hun kring om me naar voren te laten komen. “Wat denkt de signorina?” spoorde een heer aan, alsof een dame die een mening durfde te uiten een noviteit was. Ik kende deze mannen niet, maar ik stortte me in de discussie, hun kunstmatige manier van spreken aannemend. “Reliëf dat het gezichtsvermogen misleidt ligt net zozeer binnen het bereik van de schilderkunst als van de beeldhouwkunst omdat met schilderen alle kleuren van de natuur vorm kunnen worden gegeven, waar de beeldhouwkunst slechts licht en donker tot haar beschikking heeft. Hoewel de beeldhouwkunst diepte creëert die door aanraking wordt waargenomen, verwerft de schilderkunst diepte zonder dat voordeel. Daarin ligt de grotere uitdaging en derhalve haar superioriteit.” “De signorina heeft gelijk,” bracht Galileo in. “Wat is er zo indrukwekkend aan het nabootsen van de beeldhouwster, de Natuur, door de natuur zelf, steen, te gebruiken om volume te creëren?” Hij wendde zich tot mij voor mijn instemming. “ Van de twee is de schilderkunst de superieure, maar om meer dan één reden. De schilderkunst, zijnde tweedimensionaal, staat verder van de realiteit, en hoe verder de middelen om na te bootsen staan van datgene wat nagebootst moet worden, des te bewonderenswaardiger de nabootsing zal zijn.

Tussen twee roze marmeren kolommen stond Donatello's Magdalena op hoge leeftijd. In één schokkend moment werd alles me duidelijk. Een uitgemergelde figuur met wilde holle ogen in diepe oogkassen en ingevallen wangen, geteisterd door de tijd in de wildernis, haar handen tegen elkaar, biddend. Ze was blootsvoets, haar dunne benen wijd gespreid, naakt, niet kunstzinnig naakt, slechts bedekt door in de knoop zittend haar dat tot haar knieën reikte. In haar openstaande mond stonden slechts twee tanden als kleine grafstenen. Haar verschrompelde benen zo wijd uit elkaar en haar gekromde tenen die haar aan de aarde nagelden terwijl ze verlangde naar de hemel. Ik rilde.

Als aan de grond genageld stond ik voor Masaccio’s Verbanning uit het paradijs. In een sombere, bruine omgeving, die in niets leek op een tuin, hield Adam zijn gebogen hoofd bedekt met zijn handen. Eva’s ogen waren gewonde holtes die bijna dicht waren geknepen en haar openstaande mond uitte een gekwelde kreet die door de tijd echode en in mijn hart weergalmde. Het pathos van hun schaamte ontroerde me zo erg dat mijn benen verslapten. Ik hield me vast aan de stenen balustrade. Tussen Eva en mij voelde ik geen kloof van eeuwen gapen. “Ik wil haar in mijn armen nemen om haar te troosten,” zei ik zacht. “Michelangelo, Rafaël en Botticelli zaten precies hier dit fresco na te tekenen,” zei Pietro met een nonchalance alsof hij meer dan honderd jaar geleden tussen ze had gestaan.

despise the idea that paintings are investments,” Auguste said. “Why not hang a Suez Canal stock certificate on the wall?