Vreeland Quotes

You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.

The only real elegance is in the mind; if you've got that, the rest really comes from it.

There's only one very good life and that's the life you know you want and you make it yourself.

It’s not about the dress you wear, but it’s about the life you lead in the dress.

I think when you’re young you should be a lot with yourself and your sufferings. Then one day you get out where the sun shines and the rain rains and the snow snows and it all comes together.

You don't have to be born beautiful to be wildly attractive.

The first rule that a geisha is taught, at the age of nine, is to be charming to other women...Every girl in the world should have geisha training.

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.

Too much good taste can be boring

I once heard someone say, "I shall die very young. How young? I don’t know. Maybe seventy, maybe eighty, maybe ninety. But I shall be very young.

A funny person is funny only for so long, but a wit can sit down and go on being spellbinding forever. One is not meant to laugh. One stays quiet and marvels. Spontaneously witty talk is without question the most fascinating entertainment there is.

I loathe narcissism, but I approve of vanity.

I adore fringe.

You gotta have style to get up in the morning

People who eat white bread have no dreams.

maintainence is elegance. Diana Vreeland. vogue magazine 1984.

Unshined shoes are the end of civilization.

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.

What sells is hope.

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.

I adore that pink, it is the navy blue of India!

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.

A new dress doesn’t get you anywhere. It's the life you’re living in the dress.

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

You don’t have to be born beautiful to be wildly attractive.

Beauty is in all beings that love and are loved, animals and children, and if older women have it, it is because they feel completely free in this world and in their lives as they feel close to God....and they are spiritually in tune with the universe." December 6 1968. Letter to Miss Anita Colby, 3 East 78th Street, New York

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.

The woman was Diana Vreeland, the high priestess of fashion and legendary fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar and editor-in-chief of Vogue. Dana paused, eyes wide. Well, perhaps she was a bit star-struck after all.

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.

All my life I’ve pursued the perfect red. I can never get painters to mix it for me. It’s exactly as if I’d said, “I want Rococo with a spot of Gothic in it and a bit of Buddhist temple” – they have no idea what I’m talking about. About the best red is to copy the color of a child’s cap in any Renaissance portrait.

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...

<"To bewitch" is to me always slightly artificial as it is always put on -- whereas witchery is a form of naturalness that some people can't help, and the world judges that they don't create it ...> November 15 1967 memo to Mrs. Loew Gross re "THE ROMANTIC POINT OF VIEW

Pale pink salmon is the only color I cannot abide––although, naturally, I adore pink. I love the pale Persion pinks of the little carnations of Provence and Schiaparelli’s pink, the pink of the Incas…And though it’s so vieux jeu I can hardly bear to repeat it––pink is the navy blue of India.

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.

We are not looking for endless variety--we are looking for fashion." February 10, 1967, Memo re HAIR ON SITTINGS

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.

Election is a matter of vocation, not specifically salvation.

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.

A lie to get out of something, or take an advantage for oneself, that’s one thing; but a lie to make life more interesting—well, that’s entirely different.

As Wright has repeated so often, “We must stop giving nineteenth-century answers to sixteenth-century questions and try to give twenty-first-century answers to first-century questions.

I think when you’re young you should be a lot with yourself and your sufferings. Then one day you get out where the sun shines and the rain rains and the snow snows, and it all comes together.

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.

I don't think you have enough "new" words - and speaking of languor I would speak of it as 'a touch of languor' which comes from the depths of well-rested people who enjoy their life..." November 15 1967 memo to Mrs. Loew Gross re "THE ROMANTIC POINT OF VIEW

Snobs by Julian Fellowes The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee People Like Us by Dominick Dunne The Power of Style by Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins (this is out of print; I will lend you my copy) Pride and Avarice by Nicholas Coleridge The Soong Dynasty by Sterling Seagrave Freedom by Jonathan Franzen D. V. by Diana Vreeland A Princess Remembers: The Memoirs of the Maharani of Jaipur by Gayatri Devi Jane Austen—complete works beginning with Pride and Prejudice Edith Wharton—The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, The Buccaneers, The House of Mirth (must be read in strict order—you will understand why when you finish the last one) Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh Anthony Trollope—all the books in the Palliser series, beginning with Can You Forgive Her?

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.

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...

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.

A pigeon is the same thing as a dove. Did you know that?

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.

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.

Snobs by Julian Fellowes The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee People Like Us by Dominick Dunne The Power of Style by Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins (this is out of print; I will lend you my copy) Pride and Avarice by Nicholas Coleridge The Soong Dynasty by Sterling Seagrave Freedom by Jonathan Franzen D. V. by Diana Vreeland A Princess Remembers: The Memoirs of the Maharani of Jaipur by Gayatri Devi Jane Austen—complete works beginning with Pride and Prejudice

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...