Agnes's Quotes

#1. Megan looked into Agnes's frightened face. Agnes had been so sharp just a few years back - funny and cutting and wonderfully ribald.

Harlan Coben

#2. Life is so full of miseries, minor and major; they press so close upon us at every step of the way, that it is hardly worthwhile to call one another's attention to their presence.

Agnes Repplier

#3. It's a way of living, sharing things with people who work with me, and they seem to enjoy it.

Agnes Varda

#4. It's not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it's not possible to find it elsewhere.

Agnes Repplier

#5. Doing what you were born to do ... That's the way to be happy.

Agnes Martin

#6. You must learn to drink the cup of life as it comes ... without stirring it up from the bottom. That's where the bitter dregs are!

Agnes Sligh Turnbull

#7. The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world's mirth.

Agnes Repplier

#8. Words are changing. I find that old expressions are outdated, so when I write something, I try to find a new expression that hasn't been born yet. It's difficult.

Agnes Denes

#9. Nostalgia doesn't make sense, because it's like bringing the memories back to be a special part of my day or to be part of my week. And I'm inside my memories the same way I'm inside my everyday life.

Agnes Varda

#10. Gleaning is getting things that are abandoned. I did not abandon my early pictures, my photos, my early films. It's just going through my body of work as something I can pick from.

Agnes Varda

#11. It's interesting work for me to tell my life, as a possibility for other people to relate it to themselves - not so much to learn about me.

Agnes Varda

#12. Aunt Agnes said, "It's hard to make a good Christian out of a cat.

Richard Peck

#13. There's nobody living who couldn't stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall ... Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can see my painting. Nature is like parting a curtain, you go into it ... as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean.

Agnes Martin

#14. I think our minds respond to things beyond this world. Take beauty: it's a very mysterious thing, isn't it? I think it's a response in our minds to perfection. It's too bad, people not realizing that their minds expand beyond this world.

Agnes Martin

#15. It's peaceful to think about the family as a group. I totally believe in extended families.

Agnes Varda

#16. Do not rely completely on any other human being, however dear. We meet all life's greatest tests alone.

Agnes Macphail

#17. Granny hesitated. "Agnes who calls herself Perditax?"
"Perdita X," said Nanny. She at least respected anyone's right to recreate themselves.

Terry Pratchett

#18. It's not about facts, it's about feelings. It's about remembering feelings and happiness. A definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions. I think the highest form of art is music. It's the most abstract of all art expression.

Agnes Martin

#19. Society likes to file you away, put you in this or that category. And I never fit any category. Maybe that's why I was left out of a lot of things, or why my work was not really understood, because there was no precedent for it.

Agnes Denes

#20. Philosophy gets its ugly head into everything, but I don't think we live philosophy anymore. It's done.

Agnes Denes

#21. I'd been educated stupidly, I knew nothing about nothing, that's part of being shy.

Agnes Varda

#22. Agnes was the worst prophet that's ever existed. Because she was always right. That's why the book never sold.

Neil Gaiman

#23. Carpe Jugulum," read Agnes aloud. "That's ... well, Carpe Diem is 'Sieze the Day,' so this means-"
"Go for the throat

Terry Pratchett

#24. Patriotism is not dying for one's country, it is living for one's country. And for humanity. Perhaps that is not as romantic, but it's better.

Agnes Macphail

#25. For me personally, I think I just enjoy movies about werewolves or vampires because it's not like an everyday thing. It's something you can really escape into.

Agnes Bruckner

#26. It's an unavoidable truth. Fear of life closes off more opportunities for us than fear of death ever does.

Agnes Moorehead

#27. I always was alone. And I'm alone today. It's fine. I have lots of friends, but not in terms of working together.

Agnes Denes

#28. If you know nothing, it could be like an enemy in a way. I think that's the way I felt when I was young.

Agnes Varda

#29. It's always difficult to know if a song needs more than piano, and I worry about my tendency to go in a sparse direction.

Agnes Obel

#30. Sometimes I want to work with a DP, sometimes I want to work myself. I go to 35mm, 16mm, it's all the same, but it depends on what you want to tell and what are the tools you need.

Agnes Varda

#31. There's no precedent for women philosophers and there's no precedence for most of the things I did.

Agnes Denes

#32. If a diplomat says yes, he means perhaps. If he says perhaps he means no. And if he says no, he's the hell of a diplomat.

Agnes Sligh Turnbull

#33. Burning logs can carry on quite a conversation! ... Have you ever heard apple wood talking? It's the most loquacious of all. You really can't get a word in edgeways.

Agnes Sligh Turnbull

#34. The story of a couple is always very fragile, especially over more than thirty years. People know it's not easy, and even though you have strong feeling and desire and endless love, it doesn't always happen.

Agnes Varda

#35. Agnes. Don't pretend you disagree. This is all there is and you know it. Life, here, in our veins. There is the snow, and the sky, and the stars and the things they tell us, and that's all.

Hannah Kent

#36. Every misused word revenges itself forever upon a writer's reputation.

Agnes Repplier

#37. When it comes time for punishment for our sins, surely it's only the person who's done wrong who's expected to pay?"
Sister Agnes smiled, "Not even them, if they've accepted the Savior.

Elizabeth Ludwig

#38. Feelings such as loneliness, longing or love are sometimes hard to put into words; maybe that's why we all love music, because it resonates with something we can't share.

Agnes Obel

#39. Okay, Shane," Agnes said as Brenda's clock gonged midnight. "I got Joey in the kitchen, a cop in the front hall, a dead body in the basement, and you in my bedroom. Where do you want to start?

Jennifer Crusie

#40. It's through discipline and tremendous disappointment and failure that you arrive at what it is you must paint.

Agnes Martin

#41. The audience is the controlling factor in the actor's life. It is practically infallible, since there is no appeal from its verdict. It is a little like a supreme court composed of irresponsible minors.

Agnes Repplier

#42. I had had to learn the difference between the bearable fatigue and the unbearable, the fatigue of fear. The first can be cured by a night's sleep; the second kills.

Agnes De Mille

#43. Adam lived in an apartment located above the office of St. Agnes Catholic Church, a fortuitous combination that focused most of the objects of Ronan's worship into one downtown block.

Maggie Stiefvater

#44. I hated myself totally white. So now I cheat. It's my white hair, and I put color there. My grandson says I'm punk.

Agnes Varda

#45. The tree is made by nature, mathematics by people. And combining the two is creating this beautiful alliance between humanity and nature. That's why my forests are mathematical expansion systems, all of them.

Agnes Denes

#46. With 'Philharmonics,' I had to do a lot of interviews, and it was like I was corrupting something. In many ways, I've said everything in the song. And either I can't go back to what it was because it's changing when I play it, or I still haven't figured out what the song is about.

Agnes Obel

#47. Fulfill your potential. That's the way to happiness.

Agnes Martin

#48. Those Puritans would spice the Gallic stew of upper Maine for years, causing no end of trouble to Agnes, who, to be fair, was a witch and a succubus and everything else they ever called her, but that's no excuse for being such poor neighbors, when you think about it.

Catherynne M Valente

#49. I think everyone is born 100 percent ego, and after that it's just adjustment.

Agnes Martin

#50. Women don't paint very well. It's a fact. There are, of course, exceptions. Agnes Martin or, from the past, Paula Modersohn-Becker.

Georg Baselitz

#51. I used to get very nervous before a concert. It's okay when you are in a band. You can kind of disappear. But when it's just you ... yes, that was difficult. I would not say it is easy now. But when you do it for a long time, you do learn to cope.

Agnes Obel

#52. When the desire ain't on me I don't need help. When it is on me I don't want any. See? Like the old fellah that never mended his roof. Said on a wet day he couldn't do it and on a dry day it was as good as anybody's.

Agnes Sligh Turnbull

#53. No one yet knows what a man's province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial.

Agnes Smedley

#54. What I discovered in Berlin was this immense freedom because it felt like you could start any kind of project and nobody would care ... and that's what I sort of adopted to my own.

Agnes Obel

#55. It's easy to act honorable when things are coming along and all your pastures are green.Sarah Agnes Prine

Nancy E. Turner

#56. Anne's is a world very like this one, and you can move about in it with familiarity - but not freedom: it is a place of rigorous consequence, where the weak have to give way to the strong, where her governess heroine Agnes must walk as best she can in the cold shade of money and masculinity.

Jude Morgan

#57. When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It's like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high - you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.

Agnes Varda

#58. They drive back home to grab his backpack and as he bends and kisses his grandma Agnes, she scrunches a one-hundred-dollar bill in his hand. "Buy yourself some chocolates, Tom."
It's what she'd say to him as a kid with a twenty cent coin.

Melina Marchetta

#59. Art ... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.

Agnes Repplier

#60. People are always fighting reality until it's pushed down their throats.

Agnes Denes

#61. Thinking has an understructure and underpinnings.

Agnes Denes

#62. The human soul, by once suffering as much as it is capable of, purchases a strange and terrible immunity to all the rest of life's sorrows.

Agnes Sligh Turnbull

#63. One thing that's paramount in my life is that I am alone. I'm a loner. And yet I have many friends and I don't feel lonely. And I even like my own company. But when I'm alone, it's to read or write. I'm in my thoughts. Mostly I'm learning.

Agnes Denes

#64. The main thing in making art often is letting go of your expectation and your idea.

Agnes Martin

#65. We use up words as we use up images. We use up everything, and that's good, because it makes us grow.

Agnes Denes

#66. Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.

Agnes De Mille

#67. I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.

Agnes Smedley

#68. Dancing is such a despised and dishonored trade that if you tell a doctor or a laywer you do choreography he'll look at you as if you were a hummingbird. Dancers don't get invited to visit people. It is assumed a boy dancer will run off with the spoons and a girl with the head of the house.

Agnes De Mille

#69. I am seventy years old, a gray age weighted with uncompromising biblical allusions. It ought to have a gray outlook, but it hasn't, because a glint of dazzling sunshine is dancing merrily ahead of me.

Agnes Repplier

#70. Once the pursuit of truth begins to haunt the mind, it becomes an ideal never wholly attained.

Agnes Meyer Driscoll

#71. The boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It's unbelievable. The film critics don't know my artwork and the art world doesn't know my films.

Agnes Varda

#72. Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

Agnes Obel

#73. If everybody floated with the tide of talk, placidity would soon end in stagnation. It is the strong backward stroke which stirs the ripples, and gives animation and variety.

Agnes Repplier

#74. What's the name for the space between stars?"
"No such name."
"Make one up."
I thought about it. "The soul asylum."
"That's another way of saying heaven, Agnes.

Hannah Kent

#75. There is a natural limit to the success we wish our friends, even when we have spurred them on their way.

Agnes Repplier

#76. Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man ... the highest joy is to fight by the side of those who for any reason of their own making or ours, are unable to develop to full human stature.

Agnes Smedley

#77. I wanted to speak strongly about feminism in my life, since it's been a struggle.

Agnes Varda

#78. I didn't have a list of things I should do this year, next year, find a good novel, sign two stars and make a deal - because I think cinema should come from cinema. I never adapted anything. Beautiful books are beautiful books, that's it. I don't know why we should transform them.

Agnes Varda

#79. People who think of children's nudity as a tool don't need freedom of expression.

Agnes Chan

#80. The choreographic process is exhausting. It happens on one's feet after hours of work, and the energy required is roughly the equivalent of writing a novel and winning a tennis match simultaneously.

Agnes De Mille

#81. You sort of underestimate the human being when you say that every least thing that is an abstract experience is spiritual. It isn't. It's just your real self. You can be capable of fantastic abstract experiences, right in this life.

Agnes Martin

#82. More and more do I see that only a successful revolution in India can break England's back forever and free Europe itself. It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.

Agnes Smedley

#83. It's nice to think that we have in ourselves the energy. It's somewhere, but it's sleeping sometimes. I try to wake it up when I need it.

Agnes Varda

#84. I tried to find a language for the film - not just telling stories. I picked the Picasso painting because it said more than I could explain. I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That's what I try to do all the time.

Agnes Varda

#85. I would like my work to be recognized as being in the classical tradition (Coptic, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese), as representing the Ideal in the mind. Classical art cannot possibly be eclectic. One must see the ideal in one's own mind. It is like a memory - an awareness -of perfection.

Agnes Martin

#86. People like my films. They understand me through my films; it's like a connection that has been established between all my work and myself and the audience and the viewer.

Agnes Varda

#87. There's something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.

Agnes Smedley

#88. When I started I did not know I wanted to be a filmmaker. I started - I made a film. Then when I finished I said, Oh my god it's so beautiful - I should be a filmmaker!

Agnes Varda

#89. [Pablo] Picasso really changed my life. It's strange to say so, but I started to see some Picasso paintings very early. I was very young, and he was not so much known.

Agnes Varda

#90. I study what I work with. I studied all these different fields of science that I needed for my work. I studied how to mine a landfill and what to plant in it. It's fascinating because you learn a new field each time.

Agnes Denes

#91. It's a way of living, cinema. And I see my family, I do this and that, I travel. It's a long process to let it happen.

Agnes Varda

#92. Ours is an upbeat, a hurried, hasty beat. It keeps pressing us to go farther, to include everything so that we can savor everything, so that we can know everything, so that we will miss nothing. Partly it's greed, but mainly its curiosity. We just want to experience it. And we do.

Agnes De Mille

#93. There's no "magic secret"; writing is like everything else; ten percent inspiration or talent, and ninety percent hard work. Persistence; keeping at it till you get there. As Agnes de Mille said, it means working every day - bored, tired, weary, or with a fever of a hundred and two.

Marion Zimmer Bradley

#94. My parents, Mary Agnes Smith and Rowland Smith, both had to work since their early teens, she in the holiday boarding house of her mother and he in his father's market garden in Marton Moss, a village on the south side of Blackpool, just north of Saint Anne's-on-Sea.

Michael Smith

#95. Whatever is dirty, it is women's job to clean up, or drive some man to clean up, and that goes for everything from cellar to senate.

Agnes Macphail

#96. I really believe it's not bad to look back within music. I don't mean retro, but using your own memories to make a song because our memories are what make us who we are.

Agnes Obel

#97. I get a lot of dark scripts now. I don't wanna be stuck doing movies like American Pie. For someone my age, once you get started doing them, it's hard to get out.

Agnes Bruckner

#98. I see all these students, and I admire them - they're trying to learn something, they go to school, they do film school, they go on shoots, they help. I'm sure they learn a lot, and some of them, it makes them aware of what they wish to do. I was - that's the way I was - autodidact.

Agnes Varda

#99. [On religion:] Wasn't it invented by man for a kind of solace? It's as though he had said, 'I'll make me a nice comfortable garment to shut out the heat and the cold,' and then it ends by becoming a strait-jacket.

Agnes Sligh Turnbull

#100. What a couple. I'm consumed into ashes. And he's always raking up the ashes and setting them on fire again.

Agnes Smedley