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.

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.

What the world calls failure, I call learning.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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

Think hard before you begin, then enter the work.

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

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.

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.

Overblown responsibility was a part of my preoccupation with myself.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Find some beauty along the way.

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

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

His intensity was magnetic, irresistible.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Look and look and don’t ever forget. Now, close your eyes. Here, give me your hand. And just feel. Can you feel the Earth move?

That’s what great art is supposed to do—help us to live in the spirit and die at peace.

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.

In this universe where I knew now we were not the center, where I was as insignificant and unremarkable as a grain of salt seen from a tower, God still allowed me to take my next breath.

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.

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.

I know. But it’s got to be this way, that she isn’t sure, so people looking at it a long time from now, women and men too, might feel badly, might even weep that at some ignorant time there was once a woman raped who was pressured, even expected, to kill herself.

Should I explain to him Galileo’s discovery that we are not what we thought—that our lives are made smaller by the unimportance of our dwelling place on the periphery, like a touch of color at the edge of a painting, contributing to the whole but unnoticed by most?

Before this I had always held back, had never lived freely, not with Pietro, not even with Palmira, but here, where nothing was known, I did not fear judgment, and because Father and I shared the same sensibilities, all the rigidness of my living melted and I felt myself coming into myself. If it was genuine, if it would last, it was a wonderful feeling.

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

Her stony coldness was more convincing of the cataclysm than the dirt. Argument was as futile now as blame in Eden. I could not bear to look at her. She had cast away her soul.

There was something in this girl he could never grasp, an inner life inscrutable to him. He was in awe of the child's flights of fancy, her insatiable passion always to be running off somewhere, her active inner life.

Non esiste un ingresso che immetta nella fortezza dell'anima.

William uncorked the bottle and poured. 'Here’s to the end of summer.' 'A beautiful summer,' Bernard added. 'I wish it would last forever,' Alice said. 'You wouldn’t value it as much,' said Bernard. 'When joys are sparse, they sink into you more deeply.

No matter where life takes you,’ she said, ‘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.

Regardless of Galileo’s logic, the highest of arts, I realized, is to uplift the spirit, whatever means one uses.

Just think. We’re whizzing through the universe.

Which one is really my child? The one I brought forth with my own groans who has no liking for the thing I love most in all the world, or the stranger’s child whom fate placed in my life, the one who is absorbing and treasuring every word I give her, whose eyes are learning every day, whom I would love to teach...

I leaned out the window to feel the night’s deep blue, the same dark air that surrounded him in Genoa or Paris or wherever he was. I would give a great deal to know what he was thinking right at this moment. If a person could know for certain what the other person was thinking or doing, then loneliness might cease to exist in the world.

But even one-way love, fleeting love, is better than no love at all. I’m grateful for having had the feeling.

I had brought something out of the earth, and it was used to make something beautiful.

When something changes your life, Lisette, you remember everything.

The trouble with us is that we’ve been too polite with each other.

From gilt to gold, from glass to gems,” said Bernard, piling mashed potatoes and peas on the back of his fork. “Ingenuity bred wealth, and now wealth is breeding art. We could call it the Tiffany Imperative for each son to exceed his father.

Someday, when women are considered equal to men, it will become known that a woman of great importance created those lamps. This isn’t the Middle Ages, Clara. You will not be lost to history like the makers of those medieval windows in Gloucester are. Someone will find you.

I’m sure you agree that one of the greatest pleasures in life is doing what other people say you cannot do.

He showed me a small brochure titled 'Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Glass Mosaics, 1895,' and told me to look on the second page. There it was in black and white: “Many of the firm’s great mosaic projects have been executed by women.

Men of the old school would call her a brazen wench, but I found her to be ambitious and zestful. At least she didn’t lie.

Workshop! Then you consider yourself a New Woman, do you?” Mrs. Hackley looked down her nose at her plate. “It’s my opinion, and that of many social commentators, that when a woman joins the ranks of men in workshops, her morals sink, so mind your step.” “She’s employed in the arts, Mrs. Hackley, not in a carriage factory, and the arts are a moral force.

I have never been able to understand how a true lady could accept money from anyone but a father, a husband, an uncle, or a brother.

It’s very satisfying to encourage and train artists from immigrant families so they’ll create from their own experiences. Eventually, the art of Lower East Side immigrants may become more American than that of artists trained in the conservatism at the Met and other art academies.