Quotes from Susan Vreeland

put herself back together again and again. She would drink the forest liquids and drench herself in possibility.

If I don't love the feelings I have while creating those windows, I'm only working for coin and not from soul.

When Constantine was told that the Roman rabble had stoned the head of his statue, he raised his hands to his head and said, 'How remarkable. I don't feel the least bit hurt.

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

at age seventy-four, she was asked what had been the outstanding events of her life. She responded, "Work and more work! . . . loving everything terrifically. . . . The outstanding event to me is the doing—which I am still at.

Just think. We're whizzing through the universe.

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.

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...

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.

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.

Look and look and don't ever forget. Now, close your eyes. Here, give me your hand. And just feel. Can you feel the Earth move?

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

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

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?

Edwin must have extended himself to this woman who the world would never know existed. His compassion for others had a strange effect on me. Every time I learned of some help he gave to someone, I felt he was giving the kindness to me.

But even one-way love, fleeting love, is better than no love at all. I'm grateful for having had the feeling.

docks—I thought of these acts as love offerings to me. Despite the time and intensity he gave to others, he made me feel that I was the vessel into which he was pouring his best self. I realized I had come to love him for his hunger to bless. The

Before this I had always held back, had never lived freely, not with Pietro, not even with Palmira, but here, where nothing was known, I did not fear judgment, and because Father and I shared the same sensibilities, all the rigidness of my living melted and I felt myself coming into myself. If it was genuine, if it would last, it was a wonderful feeling.

How does one end a moment like this? It would kill her to feel him pull away. She had to be first. In a moment. One moment more. Yes. Now

Paint a self-portrait, for our parlor. I want to see that one eyebrow permanently arched, permanently skeptical—the look of someone who doesn't suffer prudes easily.

William uncorked the bottle and poured. 'Here's to the end of summer.' 'A beautiful summer,' Bernard added. 'I wish it would last forever,' Alice said. 'You wouldn't value it as much,' said Bernard. 'When joys are sparse, they sink into you more deeply.

As New York careens toward the modernity of the twentieth century when Gibson girls were transforming themselves into working women, Clara Driscoll enters the male field of stained glass artistry and builds a lively, multi-national, multi-class women's department within Tiffany Studios.

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.

Everybody works . . . . That's what life is. Work and a little play and a lot of prayer.