Quotes from 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

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.

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.

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.

Reproducing nature slavishly is not art.

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.

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

Find some beauty along the way.

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

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

Surely a woman, not just a painter, needs a place where she can nurture her individuality, where she can become. Pascal

His intensity was magnetic, irresistible.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

painting. Carefully, I took down the goat, the chicken, and me and

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.

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.

I came to see that knowing what love isn't might be just as valuable, though infinitely less satisfying, as knowing what it is.