Etel Adnan Quotes

Abstract art was the quivalent of poetic expression; I didn’t need to use words,but colors and lines. I didn’t need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression.

There are not millions of deaths. It happens millions of times that someone dies.

Do what your inner soul tells you to do, regardless of any money or success it will bring you.

I love rains which carry desires to oceans.

To read a lot of trash mixing the blood of war with business’s stench. To root out any happiness. To go out, and down, and on the road. To hesitate; to go on, and ahead, and back, and up the stairs, and in one’s room. On the way, to notice that the mountain is still there. To lie and sleep, deeply, heavily. To reproduce night’s sleep. To wake up, look through the window at green water, from the Bay to the mountain, and return to one’s self. To remember that war is devastating Irak. To feel pain.

I love contemporary poetry because it moves between what we call poetry and what we call philosophy. It joins these fields and makes writing more natural, as in how it is lived in the person. We don’t separate thinking from feeling in real life, so why should we separate it in writing?

The books I'm writing are houses that I build for myself.

I always had a few people who liked what I did, and that was enough.

Not seeing rivers is also another way of dying.

There is in Ammiel Alcalay’s work an unabashed tenderness for the world as it is, and that makes him courageous, different.

if you aren't here your heart won't break in the same way.