Quotes from Susan Vreeland

Whatever it is that can help to bring God close is something to be revered.

I don't know if a historian or scholar owns an opinion.

It was only after I began to write fiction that I found a way to connect with painting.

I made my personal discovery of Emily Carr while visiting Victoria in 1981 to write a travel article. Immediately, her strong colors attracted me; her spunk fascinated me. Her down-to-earth voice in her writing appealed to me as authentic and original.

I write about art out of gratitude to painters for the joy and spiritual uplift they have given me. Painters interpret for us the visual glories of God and, in this way, bring us closer to Him.

After one hundred days of confinement following a bone marrow transplant, I rejoiced in taking short walks to a nearby park as I was writing 'Girl in Hyacinth Blue.' The uncertainty of my survival made every blade of grass gorgeous in its green intensity, lifting itself up, doing its part to make the world beautiful.

Color has always been important to me, ever since my first deluxe box of Crayolas.

'Luncheon of the Boating Party,' owned by The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., has served Americans as a symbol of France and French culture, both of which I love, and is as evocative and triumphant an image as that other emissary of France, the Statue of Liberty.

When I was nine, my great grandfather, a landscape painter, taught me to mix colors. With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared as if by magic on a page of textured watercolor paper.

The Tiffany lamp is an American icon bridging the immigrants, settlement houses, and the slums of the Lower East Side and the wealthy industrialists of upper Manhattan, the Gilded Age and its excesses.

Susan B. Anthony said that the bicycle did more to emancipate women than any other single thing. The bicycle was linked in the psyches of women at that time as a symbol of practical emancipation. Women could go places, wear their skirts shorter to manage the bicycle, and be independent.

I could say diamonds are a girl's best friend, and that never changes. But the taste for art did change.

When I learned that near Roussillon there were ochre quarries and mines from which was extracted the ore which produced pigments in all the warm hues of the color wheel, I had a substantial artistic link to this region beyond mere love.

There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.

Two of my grandfathers had been artists, lifelong oil painters, so I was exposed to art very young. I've always been interested in it, although I never pursued it as a career or even as an avocation.

The gift art gives us is that instead of seeing only our own world, we see into other times, which offers a window into other cultures and sensibilities.

When I see Tiffany windows in churches across the United States, I get a sense of spiritual upliftment from that.

The idea of being close to where pigments were mined - that's the first thing in making a painting, getting the material. And what's the last thing you do in making a painting? You put a frame around it.

Where there is no human connection, there is no compassion. Without compassion, then community, commitment, loving-kindness, human understanding, and peace all shrivel. Individuals become isolated, the isolated turn cruel, and the tragic hovers in the forms of domestic and civil violence. Art and literature are antidotes to that.

I pored over art books and absorbed the placidness of Monet's garden, the sparkling color of the Impressionists, the strength and solidity of Michelangelo's figures showing the titanic power of humans at one with God, Jan Vermeer's serene Dutch women bathed in gorgeous honey-colored light... My conviction grew that art was stronger than death.

I'm hoping that I make readers into museum goers and museum goers into readers.

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.

I wanted to keep a Gothic cathedral alive in my heart.

Archival and published history does not always record personal relationships of historical figures, so characters must be invented to allow the subject to reveal their interior realm through intimate interaction.