Anne Truitt Quotes

#1. 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.

Anne Truitt

#2. 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.

Anne Truitt

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

Anne Truitt

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

Anne Truitt

#5. 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.

Anne Truitt

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

Anne Truitt

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

Anne Truitt

#8. 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.

Anne Truitt

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

Anne Truitt

#10. It is ultimately character that underwrites art.

Anne Truitt

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

Anne Truitt

#12. I have no home but me.

Anne Truitt

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

Anne Truitt

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

Anne Truitt

#15. Artists have no choice but to express their lives,

Anne Truitt

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

Anne Truitt

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

Anne Truitt

#18. vulnerability is a guardian of integrity

Anne Truitt

#19. 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.

Anne Truitt

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

Anne Truitt

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

Anne Truitt

#22. Humility is the daughter of truth.

Anne Truitt

#23. 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.

Anne Truitt

#24. Generosity is often the stalking horse of control.

Anne Truitt

#25. The hallmark of a decision in line with one's inner development is a feeling of having laid down a burden and picked up a more natural responsibility.

Anne Truitt

#26. Perhaps the human lesson is always submission. We have a choice: to rebel or to recognize our powerlessness while maintaining our faith.

Anne Truitt

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

Anne Truitt

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

Anne Truitt

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

Anne Truitt