Quotes from Etel Adnan

Mount Tamalpais became my house. For Cezanne, Sainte-Victoire was no longer a mountain. It was an absolute. It was painting.

My writing and my paintings do not have a direct connection in my mind. But I am sure they influence each other in the measure that everything we do is linked to whatever we are, which includes whatever we have done or are doing.

We were taught to think that Paris was the center of the universe.

Do what your inner soul tells you to do, regardless of any money or success it will bring you.

I always had a few people who liked what I did, and that was enough.

Colours exist for me as entities in themselves, as metaphysical beings.

I didn't want to read French or write it; it was like a boycott, a rejection.

I love rains which carry desires to oceans.

Morning. Vast. Imprecision. Fog has covered everything in gray absolute. This has lasted. Doubt looms over the mind. Absence is harder to accept than death.

There are moments when the past ceases to be a form of the present. Rain and tears look alike.

Memory and time, both immaterial, are rivers with no banks and constantly merging. Both escape our will, though we depend on them. Measured but measured by whom or by what? The one is inside, the other, outside or so it seems, but is that true? Time seems also buried deep in us but where? Memory is right here, in the head, but it can exit, abandon that head, leave it behind, disappear. Memory, a sanctuary of infinite patience.

Love in all its forms is the most important matter that we will ever face, but also the most dangerous, the most unpredictable, the most maddening. But it is also the only salvation I know of

In the green escape of my palace, over a bridge, under a canopy of opalescent light, through there, between dark branches and their shivering leaves, I'm lost in the scent of yellow roses, arrested by the range's filtering light.

Dear soul, am I only because I have been?

Eternity is non evident. There's this endless rotation of the sun in the skull, the stillness outside, and a storm within. At least a river is always flowing in some part of the country. Winds, always gathering speed, shatter the order of things. We return home, in tears.

The day is not made of light, but of will

Spring is dangerous, like love. And love survives the lovers.

Writing is drawing, drawing is writing. Because it's the same gesture. They're close already.

It is a sentiment of tremendous truth and simplicity, yet tremendously difficult for the mind to metabolize — we remain material creatures, spiritually sundered by the fact of our borrowed atoms, which we will each return to the universe, to the stardust that made us, despite our best earthly efforts.

Silence is the creation of space, a space that memory needs to use . . . an incubator. We're dealing here with dimensions, stretching our inner muscles, pushing aside any interference. We're dealing with numbers, but not counting. Silence demands the nature of night, even in full day, it demands shadows.

Their women only exert indirect powers over them, powers that seem ineffective, or else are so strong that they, the men, can't recognize them as such. But a woman who stands up to them and looks them in the eye is a tree to be cut down, and they cut it down. She falls with the sound of dead wood which disappears among the perfidious murmurings of the city, and to the smirking of other women who are satisfied with the male victories.

Words melt in reflections; that's why there's a uselessness to this night, to my missing the river, to the delaying of love... light is picking up momentum in the vicinity of the oaks that cover this property, this silence.

they tell me there are four seasons but I live in a fifth one which is your space and your time

desire intensifies on the silver edge of the sea. my friends, don't wait for me any longer, my heart is in the abundance of the same spring as yours