The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise.

My art is representational by choice....if the art of painting is to survive, it must describe and express people, their lives and times. It must communicate.

Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly they are passed on unopened.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good.

[A]t bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.

...a carefree letting go of oneself, not a caution, but a wise blindness.