Emily Carr Quotes

Let me not fuss and fret at my incompetence but be still and know that Thou art God.

Oh, Spring! I want to go out and feel you and get inspiration. My old things seem dead. I want fresh contacts, more vital searching.

There was neither horizon, cloud, nor sound; of that pink, spread silence even I had become part, belonging as much to sky as to earth.

You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion.

It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw.

The house begins to be a home. The unfamiliar places are beginning to fold the familiar objects into their keeping and to cozy them down. Objects that swore at each other when the movers heaved them into the new rooms have subsided into corners and sit to lick their feet and wash their faces like cats accepting a new home.

Up came the sun, and drank the dew.

enter into the life of the trees. Know your relationship and understand their language, unspoken, unwritten talk. Answer back to them with their own dumb magnificence, soul words, earth words, the God in you responding to the God in them.

Go out there into the glory of the woods. See God in every particle of them expressing glory and strength and power, tenderness and protection. Know that they are God expressing God made manifest.

There is a side of friendship that develops better and stronger by correspondence than contact.... The absence of the flesh in writing perhaps brings souls nearer.

The biggest part of painting perhaps is faith, and waiting receptively, content to go any way, not planning or forcing. The fear, though, is laziness. It is so easy to drift and finally be tossed up on the beach, derelict.

There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness.

It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw, not because she is Canada but because she's something sublime that you were born into, some great rugged power that you are a part of.

Art being so much greater than ourselves, it will not give up once it has taken hold.

real art is religion, a search for the beauty of God deep in all things.

I am always watching for fear of getting feeble and passé in my work. I don't want to trickle out. I want to pour till the pail is empty, the last bit going out in a gush, not in drops.

You always feel when you look it straight in the eye that you could have put more into it, could have let yourself go and dug harder.

You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

The spirit must be felt so intensely that it has power to call others in passing, for it must pass, not stop in the pictures.

Twenty can't be expected to tolerate sixty in all things, and sixty gets bored stiff with twenty's eternal love affairs.

Inspiration is intention obeyed.

The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion.

Cedars are terribly sensitive to change of time and light - sometimes they are bluish cold-green, then they turn yellow warm-green - sometimes their boughs flop heavy and sometimes float, then they are fairy as ferns and then they droop, heavy as heartaches.

Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence.

If you're going to lick the icing off somebody else's cake you won't be nourished and it won't do you any good,--or you might find the cake had caraway seeds and you hate them.

Do not try to do extraordinary things but do ordinary things with intensity.

I made myself into an envelope into which I could thrust my work deep, lick the flap, seal it from everybody.

Writing is a strong easement for perplexity. My life is a map, spread out with all the rivers and hills showing.

There is no right and wrong way to paint except honestly or dishonestly. Honestly is trying for the bigger thing. Dishonestly is bluffing and getting through a smattering of surface representation with no meaning.

Oh, the glory of growth, silent, mighty, persistent, inevitable! To awaken, to open up like a flower to the light of a fuller consciousness!

Got a new pup. He is half griffon. The other half is mistake.

The foolish square calves pretend to be frightened of our train. Bluffers! Haven't they seen it every day since they were born? It's just an excuse to shake the joy out of their heels.

I wonder why we are always sort of ashamed of our best parts and try to hide them. We don't mind ridicule of our 'sillinesses' but of our 'sobers'.

Art is art, nature is nature, you cannot improve upon it.... Pictures should be inspired by nature, but made in the soul of the artist. It is the soul of the individual that counts.

Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul.

The liveness in me just loves to feel the liveness in growing things, in grass and rain and leaves and flowers and sun and feathers and furs and earth and sand and moss.

I can rise above the humility of my failure with an intense desire to search deeper and a blind faith that some day my sight may pierce through the veils that hide. I know God's face is there if I keep my gaze steady enough.

I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.

As the woods are the same, the trees standing in their places, the rocks and the earth... they are always different too, as lights and shadows and seasons and moods pass through them.

The earth is soaked and soggy with rain. Everything is drinking its fill and the surplus gluts the drains. The sky is full of it and lies low over the earth, heavy and dense. Even the sea is wetter than usual!

Indians do not hinder the progress of their dead by embalming or tight coffining. When the spirit has gone they give the body back to the earth. the earth welcomes the body-coaxes new life and beauty from it, hurries over what men shudder at. Lovely tender herbage bursts from the graves, swiftly, exulting over corruption.

What a splendid time Woo must have had.

Art is an aspect of God and there is only one God, but different people see Him in different ways. Though He is always the same He doesn't always look the same.

Look at the earth crowded with growth, new and old bursting from their strong roots hidden in the silent, live ground, each seed according to its own kind...each one knowing what to do, each one demanding its own rights on the earth. So artist, you too from the depths of your soul...let your roots creep forth, gaining strength.

Sometimes I could quit paint and take to charring. It must be fine to clean perfectly, to shine and polish and know that it could not be done better. In painting that never occurs.

The men resent a woman getting any honour in what they consider is essentially their field. Men painters mostly despise women painters. So I have decided to stop squirming, to throw any honour in with Canada and women.