Top 79 Susan Vreeland Quotes
#1. To feel the grace of God in a painting of the dear, quiet commonness of a domestic interior, or in a landscape, seascape, cityscape, trains us to feel the grace of God in the thing itself in situ.
Susan Vreeland
#2. If I don't love the feelings I have while creating those windows, I'm only working for coin and not from soul.
Susan Vreeland
#3. Maybe that's what love was
walking willingly into the unknown for the sake of the other.
Susan Vreeland
#4. A hard choice. Water or books. Hmm. One could always have wine instead.
Susan Vreeland
#5. The company, Tiffany Studios, ended up in bankruptcy in 1930 - early '30s.
Susan Vreeland
#6. There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.
Susan Vreeland
#7. For a century, everyone assumed that the iconic Tiffany lamps were conceived and designed by that American master of stained glass. Not so! It was a woman!
Susan Vreeland
#8. He had a thought that amused him. "Figures, still life, landscape, AND an animal! Zola, eat your hat!" he bellowed.
Susan Vreeland
#9. I absorbed as many Impressionist paintings as I could, in Parisian museums and in many museums in the United States and in books, looking for clues to architecture, clothing, settings.
Susan Vreeland
#10. Work is love made plain, whether man's work or woman's work.
Susan Vreeland
#11. When I think how art education is eliminated whenever we get a budget crunch in the schools, I have to stand up and say that even when there was dire poverty ten blocks away from Tiffany Studios in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, there was art and creativity within.
Susan Vreeland
#12. You think because I am her mother I can remake her?
Susan Vreeland
#13. I wanted to keep a Gothic cathedral alive in my heart.
Susan Vreeland
#14. Erasmus says if you must be hanged let it be on fair gallows.
Susan Vreeland
#15. The painting showed she did not yet know that lives end abruptly, that much of living is repetition and separation, that buttons forever need re-sewing no matter how ferociously one works the thread, that nice things almost happen.
Susan Vreeland
#16. It was only after I began to write fiction that I found a way to connect with painting.
Susan Vreeland
#17. Susan B. Anthony said that the bicycle did more to emancipate women than any other single thing. The bicycle was linked in the psyches of women at that time as a symbol of practical emancipation. Women could go places, wear their skirts shorter to manage the bicycle, and be independent.
Susan Vreeland
#18. Bicyclist's Philosophy of Life ... It's a matter of faith. You can keep upright only by moving forward. You have to have your eyes on the goal, not the ground.
Susan Vreeland
#19. The idea of being close to where pigments were mined - that's the first thing in making a painting, getting the material. And what's the last thing you do in making a painting? You put a frame around it.
Susan Vreeland
#20. 'Luncheon of the Boating Party,' owned by The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., has served Americans as a symbol of France and French culture, both of which I love, and is as evocative and triumphant an image as that other emissary of France, the Statue of Liberty.
Susan Vreeland
#21. Everybody works ... That's what life is. Work and a little play and a lot of prayer.
Susan Vreeland
#22. Archival and published history does not always record personal relationships of historical figures, so characters must be invented to allow the subject to reveal their interior realm through intimate interaction.
Susan Vreeland
#23. Two of my grandfathers had been artists, lifelong oil painters, so I was exposed to art very young. I've always been interested in it, although I never pursued it as a career or even as an avocation.
Susan Vreeland
#24. Coming out of the Louvre for the first time in 1971, dizzy with new love, I stood on Pont Neuf and made a pledge to myself that the art of this newly discovered world in the Old World would be my life companion.
Susan Vreeland
#25. No one but another painter could know the delicacy required to balance the complexities, to keep reality at bay in order to remain in the innermost center of his work.
Susan Vreeland
#26. Re: cutting glass ... You have to be in command of the glass, telling it where to release its hold on itself. Just like life. Otherwise it will splinter.
Susan Vreeland
#27. Landscape is more than flat land covered by floodwater, the seeping of peat bogs, a river of liquid pewter viewed from a sentry tower. It's an influence on what a person values, what she is willing to sacrifice or argue for.
Susan Vreeland
#29. The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.
Susan Vreeland
#30. A woman can't stay hard when all around her is loveliness.
Susan Vreeland
#31. How easily a parent's motive could be misconstrued by an injured child.
Susan Vreeland
#32. I suppose it's easier for most writers to create and vivify characters of their own gender.
Susan Vreeland
#33. Color has always been important to me, ever since my first deluxe box of Crayolas.
Susan Vreeland
#34. Look long enough, out or in, and you'll be glad you are who you are.
Susan Vreeland
#35. At this stage of life, he'd better just lean into love, because if he fell, he feared he might break a hip.
Susan Vreeland
#36. Art history looks at art works and the people who have created them.
Susan Vreeland
#37. I made my personal discovery of Emily Carr while visiting Victoria in 1981 to write a travel article. Immediately, her strong colors attracted me; her spunk fascinated me. Her down-to-earth voice in her writing appealed to me as authentic and original.
Susan Vreeland
#38. I'm hoping that I make readers into museum goers and museum goers into readers.
Susan Vreeland
#39. Painting. Carefully, I took down the goat, the chicken, and me and
Susan Vreeland
#40. No matter where life takes you,' she said, 'the place where you stand at any moment is holy ground.
Susan Vreeland
#41. People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her.
Susan Vreeland
#42. Whatever it is that can help to bring God close is something to be revered.
Susan Vreeland
#43. As New York careens toward the modernity of the twentieth century when Gibson girls were transforming themselves into working women, Clara Driscoll enters the male field of stained glass artistry and builds a lively, multi-national, multi-class women's department within Tiffany Studios.
Susan Vreeland
#44. I would like to bring people who have never been to a museum into a museum. And I would like to bring museum goers into libraries. I think there ought to be this cross-fertilization.
Susan Vreeland
#45. One more thing. She wears Patchouli. Every tart in Montmartre wears it. Place Pigalle reeks of it. If she wants to carry out her pose as an aristocrat, she ought to refine her tastes.
Susan Vreeland
#46. If you feel joy when you do something unselfish for him, and would just as soon do it in secret as openly, then that rings of the true metal
Susan Vreeland
#47. Overblown responsibility was a part of my preoccupation with myself.
Susan Vreeland
#48. I've come to think that if doing something simple or silly can give a person pleasure, then, by God, do it
Susan Vreeland
#49. I had always held the notion that if two people love the same thing, they must love each other as well, but now the memories of that love had been tarnished by betrayal.
Susan Vreeland
#50. The gift art gives us is that instead of seeing only our own world, we see into other times, which offers a window into other cultures and sensibilities.
Susan Vreeland
#51. No matter where life takes you ... the place where you stand at any moment is holy ground. Love hard and love wide and love long, and you will find goodness in it.
Susan Vreeland
#53. To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.
Susan Vreeland
#55. When I was nine, my great grandfather, a landscape painter, taught me to mix colors. With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared as if by magic on a page of textured watercolor paper.
Susan Vreeland
#56. Things that have been lost and then found are doubly precious, don't you think. People too.
Susan Vreeland
#58. How love builds itself unconsciously, he thought, out of the momentous ordinary.
Susan Vreeland
#59. To live and move and have her being in a flow of blue.
Susan Vreeland
#60. I don't know if a historian or scholar owns an opinion.
Susan Vreeland
#61. You know, bicycling isn't just a matter of balance," I said. "it's a matter of faith. You can keep upright only by moving forward. You have to have your eyes on the goal, not the ground. I'm going to call that the Bicyclist's Philosophy of Life.
Susan Vreeland
#62. When I see Tiffany windows in churches across the United States, I get a sense of spiritual upliftment from that.
Susan Vreeland
#63. Writers have to be observant. Every nuance, every inflection in a voice, the quality of air, even - they all get mixed up in this soup of the story developing in our minds.
Susan Vreeland
#64. Now he knew ... that there was nothing so vital as paying attention, and perfecting the humble offices of love.
Susan Vreeland
#65. Train yourselves by seeking and acknowledging beauty moment by moment every day of your lives," he told them. "Exercise your eyes. Take pleasure in the grace of shape and the excitement of color.
Susan Vreeland
#66. God taking from us and loving us at the same time by providing comforters was a kind of spiritual equanimity. It seemed a phenomenon of life how a death insinuates us into the debt of those who stand by us in trouble and console us.
Susan Vreeland
#67. Allowing beauty a place in the soul was a powerful antidote to the stress and strain of mortal life.
Susan Vreeland
#68. Page 357 - if the mountain was smooth, you couldn't climb it.
Susan Vreeland
#69. Love is so easily bruised by the necessity of making choices.
Susan Vreeland
#70. He and I had a bridge that no one else traveled that made us artistic lovers, passionate without a touch of the flesh. He made me thrive, and valuing that, I could do nothing that would endanger it.
Susan Vreeland
#71. Each time we enter imaginatively into the life of another, it's a small step upwards in the elevation of the human race.
Susan Vreeland
#72. I write about art out of gratitude to painters for the joy and spiritual uplift they have given me. Painters interpret for us the visual glories of God and, in this way, bring us closer to Him.
Susan Vreeland
#73. Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.
Susan Vreeland
#74. The Tiffany lamp is an American icon bridging the immigrants, settlement houses, and the slums of the Lower East Side and the wealthy industrialists of upper Manhattan, the Gilded Age and its excesses.
Susan Vreeland
#75. When I learned that near Roussillon there were ochre quarries and mines from which was extracted the ore which produced pigments in all the warm hues of the color wheel, I had a substantial artistic link to this region beyond mere love.
Susan Vreeland
#76. If two people love the same thing, she reasoned, then they must love each other, at least a little, even if they never say it.
Susan Vreeland
#77. To feel the coolness of the blue glass, like solid pieces of the sea.
Susan Vreeland
#78. I ventured into fiction in 1988 with 'What Love Sees,' a biographical novel of a woman's unwavering determination to lead a full life despite blindness.
Susan Vreeland
#79. I could say diamonds are a girl's best friend, and that never changes. But the taste for art did change.
Susan Vreeland
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