Quotes from Georgia O'Keeffe

Anyone with any degree of mental toughness ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least.

I got half-a-dozen paintings from that shattered plate.

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.

When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me-some of them more than sixty years ago-I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives. If the person in the photographs were living in this world today, she would be quite a different person-but it doesn't matter-Stieglitz photographed her then.

I wish so much to go that I almost wish I had never been there.

Come quickly. You mustn't miss the dawn. It will never be just like this again.

I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to ... I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way-- things I had no words for.

I'm getting to like you so tremendously that it sometimes scares me.

I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.

It is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.

You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.

I do not like the idea of happyness — it is too momentary — I would say that I was always busy and interested in something — interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happyness.

The skulls were there and I could say something with them. To me they are as beautiful as anything I know. To me they are strangely more living than the animals walking around -- hair, eyes and all, with the tails switching. The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable-- and knows no kindness with all its beauty.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for. Georgia O'Keeffe

To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.

I am divided between my man and a life with him---and some thing of the outdoors---of your world---that is in my blood---and that I know I will never get rid of--- I have to get along with my divided self the best way I can---

My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it. (Life, March 1, 1968)

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see--and I don't.

RE: Lake George from a book by Lord. That's all I know. "There is something so perfect about the mountains and the lake and the trees.... sometimes I want to tear it all to pieces

and I'm disgusted with dreams now — I want real things — live people to take hold of — to see — and to talk to — music that makes holes in the sky.

My friend Doris Bry says now that I've ruined her spelling because I misspell with such confidence.

Living out here has just meant happiness. Sometimes I think I'm half-mad with love for this place.

Frieda was very special," O'Keeffe recalls. "I can remember very clearly the first time I ever saw her, standing in a doorway, with her hair all frizzed out, wearing a cheap red calico dress that looked as though she'd just wiped out the frying pan with it. She was not thin, and not young, but there was something radiant and wonderful about her.