Quotes from Anne Truitt

Art comes into the highest part of the mind, that with which we can know the presence of God.

I have no home but me.

Love ... is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.

the knowledge of personal failure ... is the invaluable predicate of all honest compassion.

I worked in between carpools and buying food and cooking and whatever else I had to do. I lived an outside life, but really I was living an inside life.

The shape of my work's development becomes a little clearer every time I am forced to articulate it.

Humility is the daughter of truth.

I come to the point of using steel, and simply cannot. It's like the marriage proposal of a perfectly eligible man who just isn't loveable. It is wood I love.

The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own intimate sensitivity.

There is an appalling amount of mechanical work in the artist's life ... Talent is mysterious, but the qualities that guard, foster, and direct it are not unlike those of a good quartermaster.

A mystery confounds the problem of industry in art. In the last analysis, to work is simply not enough. But we have to act as if it were, leaving reward aside.

the more visible my work became, the less visible I grew to myself.

The art of being officially old seems to lie in cooperative submission.

artists often lie behind on the field long after the art combine, the broad-bladed harvester of informed criticism, has mowed, bailed, and stored the crop.

No one questions the fact that verbal language has to be learned, but the commonplaceness of visual experience betrays art; people tend to assume that, because they can see, they can see art.

There's a small still center into which conception can arrive. And when it arrives, you make it welcome with your experience.

I have slowly come to realize that a family is composed of people who are teaching one another.