Quotes from Etel Adnan

philosophy is a non-knowledge: thought takes pleasure in measuring its borders

Beauty, it's an inner sense, and it makes us happy. It's not complicated, we need it.

Terror is our collective failure. Life is nature's triumph.

laziness-with it's inebriating effects- is the wine of the poor, and of those who wander among them

Night is an element of love; like fog. It liberates space, lets freshness cross it. Its magic elevates the body, brings to the surface the mystery of just being alive, being. With or without stars and galaxies, the sky becomes a private territory—the imagination's own scope. These are moments when one reaches all there is between the moon and oneself. — Etel Adnan, Etel Adnan: on Love and the Cost We Are Not Willing to Pay Today (Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH & Co KG, 2011)

It seems to me I write what I see, paint what I am.

My breathing is a tide. Love doesn't die.

to the West the trains are falling apart like Marilyn Monroe

Everyone lives Time. If then one added every second lived by each of these people, lived by each of us, by all the people of the world, at this precise moment, it would make all the eternity of Time.

I write what I see; I paint what I am.

I love Nicolas de Stael particularly, and my work can remind people of him. But looked at attentively, our works are not similar at all.

Places are part of nature, of the bigger picture. We are interrelated. When we contemplate them in their own right, they can sometimes change our lives; they can become spiritual experiences.

Once I put down a color, I never cover it up. If you are born a musician, why become a banker?

Usually, I am a compulsive person, and I need - sometimes urgently - to paint... Painting is close to poetry, is a kind of poetry expressed visually. It has to be spontaneous, rapid - at least in my case.

There is in Ammiel Alcalay's work an unabashed tenderness for the world as it is, and that makes him courageous, different.

Abstract art was the quivalent of poetic expression; I didn't need to use words,but colors and lines. I didn't need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression.