Quotes from Susan Vreeland

The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.

Writers have to be observant. Every nuance, every inflection in a voice, the quality of air, even - they all get mixed up in this soup of the story developing in our minds.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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...

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.

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