Best 28 quotes of Susan Vreeland on MyQuotes

Susan Vreeland

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    Susan Vreeland

    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.

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    Susan Vreeland

    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.

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    Susan Vreeland

    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.

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    Susan Vreeland

    Look long enough, out or in, and you’ll be glad you are who you are.

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    Susan Vreeland

    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.

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    Susan Vreeland

    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.

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    Susan Vreeland

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

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    Susan Vreeland

    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.

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    Susan Vreeland

    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.

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    Susan Vreeland

    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.

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    Susan Vreeland

    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

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    Susan Vreeland

    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.

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    Susan Vreeland

    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.

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    Susan Vreeland

    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.

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    Susan Vreeland

    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.

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    Susan Vreeland

    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.

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    Susan Vreeland

    Palmira. She’s like an apparition floating unknowingly into her future,' I said. 'Here for too brief a time.

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    Susan Vreeland

    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.

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    Susan Vreeland

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

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    Susan Vreeland

    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.

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    Susan Vreeland

    She was a desperate woman with frailties just like her, temptations just like 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 [...]

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    Susan Vreeland

    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?

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    Susan Vreeland

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

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    Susan Vreeland

    The only place Aletta and I could be together unseen was just under the rafters in the church tower, a circumstance that propelled us into an earlier intimacy than what we would have known had we been permitted to walk together Sunday afternoons under the wide sky.

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    Susan Vreeland

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

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    Susan Vreeland

    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.

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    Susan Vreeland

    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.

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    Susan Vreeland

    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...