Anne Truitt Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Artists have no choice but to express their lives.

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

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

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

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.

I have no home but me.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

Artists have no choice but to express their lives. They have only, and that not always, a choice of process. This process does not change the essential content of their work in art, which can only be their life.

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

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

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

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.

It is ultimately character that underwrites art.

Generosity is often the stalking horse of control.

When I speak now, my experience in art wells up so articulately that I am surprised even while I am talking. I move around a podium as easily as if it were my living room and although I am keyed up I am not anxious. I feel as if I were doing what I should be doing - the feeling I have when intent in my studio.

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.

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

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

Humility is the daughter of truth.

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

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

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