Quotes from Susan Vreeland

A hard choice. Water or books. Hmm. One could always have wine instead.

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.

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.

Things that have been lost and then found are doubly precious, don't you think. People too.

He and I had a bridge that no one else traveled that made us artistic lovers, passionate without a touch of the flesh. He made me thrive, and valuing that, I could do nothing that would endanger it.

What the world calls failure, I call learning.

How love builds itself unconsciously, he thought, out of the momentous ordinary.

She sat very still, listening to a stream gurgling, the breeze soughing through upper branches, the melodious kloo-klack of ravens, the nyeep-nyeep of nuthatches - all sounds chokingly beautiful. She felt she could hear the cool clean breath of growing things - fern fronds, maple leaves, white trillium petals, tree trunks, each in its rightful place.

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...

Work is love made plain, whether man's work or woman's work.

No matter where life takes you,' she said, 'the place where you stand at any moment is holy ground.

Love is so easily bruised by the necessity of making choices.

God taking from us and loving us at the same time by providing comforters was a kind of spiritual equanimity. It seemed a phenomenon of life how a death insinuates us into the debt of those who stand by us in trouble and console us.

Maybe that's what love was -- walking willingly into the unknown for the sake of the other.

In the end, it's only the moments that we have.

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.

I've come to think that if doing something simple or silly can give a person pleasure, then, by God, do it

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.

Amar es ponerse al cuello el nudo corredizo de la ilusión; adorar a alguien mientras pareces asfixiarte. Pero incluso el amor no correspondido, el amor fugaz, es mejor que nada.

No matter where life takes you...the place where you stand at any moment is holy ground. Love hard and love wide and love long, and you will find goodness in it.

Think hard before you begin, then enter the work.

Allowing beauty a place in the soul was a powerful antidote to the stress and strain of mortal life.

He had a thought that amused him. "Figures, still life, landscape, AND an animal! Zola, eat your hat!" he bellowed.

At this stage of life, he'd better just lean into love, because if he fell, he feared he might break a hip.