Anne Truitt Quotes

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

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

I never decided at all to be an artist; being an artist seems to have happened to me.

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.

Humility is the daughter of truth.

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.

It is ultimately character that underwrites art.

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

I've struggled all my life to get maximum meaning in the simplest possible form.

I have no home but me.

Our society is monstrously disjunctive, at once so efficient in war and so inefficient in caring for the welfare of its members. It is frightening to see people rooting in garbage pails on streets, living in cardboard crates under bridges, while their government wages war. Even when there is an emergency in a household, decent parents do not forget to feed the children.

January is my favorite month, when the light is plainest, least colored. And I like the feeling of beginnings.

I have been flooded with color on the inside, drab on the outside.

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

The end of parenthood is implicit in its beginning: separation.

The difference between men and women is inalienable. It is not a political fact, subject to cultural definition and redefinition, but a physical verity. We do truthfully experience our lives differently because our bodies are different. It is in what we do with our experience that we are the same. We feel, absorb and examine with the same intensity, and intense experience honestly examined informs the art of both sexes equally. ... The power of imagination illuminates all human lives in common.

the capacity to work feeds on itself and has its own course of development. This is what artists have going for them.

The finest teaching touches in a student a spring neither teacher nor student could possibly have preconceived.

Generosity is often the stalking horse of control.

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

I had forgotten what sleep is like - a kingdom all its own.

Their [artists'] essential effort is to catapult themselves wholly, without holding back one bit, into a course of action without having any idea where they will end up. They are like riders who gallop into the night, eagerly leaning on their horse's neck, peering into a blinding rain. And they have to do it over and over again.

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

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.

In the range of my character at any given moment, I have acted in the only way it seemed to me I could have acted. This in no way means that I have done what was right; only what was possible for me. Sometimes I have done what I knew was wrong, and have rationalized. But rationalization is a form of desperation. It takes kindness to forgive oneself for one's life.