Top 100 O Keeffe Quotes
#1. Women who stay true to themselves are always more interesting and beautiful to me: women like Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe and Anna Magnani - women who have style, chic, allure and elegance. They didn't submit to any standard of beauty - they defined it.
Isabella Rossellini
#2. Hack, hack, hack. I wouldn't pay twenty-five cents to spit on a Georgia O'Keeffe painting. And I think she's a horrible person, too. I know her ... So arrogant, so sure of herself. I'm sure she's carrying a dildo in her purse.
Truman Capote
#3. And I looked closer and it totally did say Latoya. But in my defense, it looked like "Labia" from a distance. Much like tacos. Or Georgia O'Keeffe paintings.
Jenny Lawson
#4. I don't need to be married to Georgia O'Keeffe or Lillian Hellman, but I like being with a woman I can look up to.
Alec Baldwin
#5. Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.
Jerry Saltz
#6. In my home country, there was a little shop with old books, but it was really in the countryside. You couldn't find English books. I found this very avant-garde American art book that had information about Georgia O'Keeffe. I was very much impressed by her.
Yayoi Kusama
#7. I keep thinking: 'Georgia O'Keeffe wouldn't have had Botox.'
Gloria Steinem
#8. Georgia O'Keeffe proposed that I live with her. She was in New Mexico then, and I wanted to be in New York.
Yayoi Kusama
#9. We stood surrounded by orchids that would make Georgia O'Keeffe teary-eyed and most lesbians distracted.
Eva Indigo
#10. I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#11. When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#12. I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#13. I realized that were I to paint flowers small, no one would look at them because I was unknown. So I thought I'll make them big, like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they'll have to look at them - and they did.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#14. Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing
and keeping the unknown always beyond you.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#15. It seems to me very important to the idea of democracy to the country and to the world eventually that all men and women stand equal under the sky.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#16. Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue - that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#17. I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#18. I don't know what Art is but I know some things it isn't when I see them.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#19. Happiness goes like the wind, but what is interesting stays.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#21. It is really so nice here-country-busy-busy with so many different kinds of things- ... I must say I feel far away in another world here- ... always we go to a new place ... the people have a kind of gentleness that isn't usual on the mainland.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#22. I like an empty wall because I can imagine what I like on it.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#23. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#24. The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho' it is vast and empty and untouchable ... and knows no kindness with all its beauty.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#25. Before I put brush to canvas, I question, 'Is this mine? ... Is it influenced by some idea which I have acquired from some man? ... I am trying with all my skill to do a painting that is all of women, as well as all of me.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#26. The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one's life.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#27. One works because I suppose it is the most interesting thing one knows to do. The days one works are the best days. On the other days one is hurrying through the other things one imagines one has to do to keep one's life going ...
Georgia O'Keeffe
#28. It was all so far away - there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#29. I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#30. There's something about black. You feel hidden away in it.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#31. Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#32. I see no reason for painting anything that can be put into any other form as well.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#35. God told me if I painted that mountain enough, I could have it.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#36. I am not functioning very well. Living with the knowledge that the baby is dead is painful. I feel so far away from you, God. I can only try to believe that you are sustaining me and guiding me through this. Please continue to stand by my side.
Christine O'Keeffe Lafser
#37. I am trying with all my skill to do a painting that is all woman, as well as all of me.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#38. I can't live where I want to, I can't go where I want to go, I can't do what I want to, I can't even say what I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#39. Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#40. It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#41. I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something - anything I had done - than anyone else I know.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#42. I have not worked at all ... Nothing seems worth putting down - I seem to have nothing to say - it appalls me but that is the way it is.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#43. The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#44. My first memory is of the brightness of light ... light all around. I was sitting among pillows on a quilt on the ground ... very large white pillows ...
Georgia O'Keeffe
#45. My center does not come from my mind - it feels in me like a plot of warm moist well tilled earth with the sun shining hot on it ... It seems I would rather feel starkly empty than let any thing be planted that cannot be tended to the fullest possibility of its growth ...
Georgia O'Keeffe
#46. I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#47. I have been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I have never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#48. His letters ... have been like fine cold water when you are terribly thirsty ...
Georgia O'Keeffe
#49. Sometimes I start in a very realistic fashion, and as I go on from one painting to another of the same kind, it becomes simplified until it can be nothing but abstraction.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#50. When you get so that you can't see, you come to it gradually. And if you didn't come by it gradually, I guess you'd just kill yourself when you couldn't see.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#51. My first memory is of light
the brightness of light
light all around.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#52. One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#54. I do not like the idea of happyness - it is too momentary - I would say that I was always busy and interested in something - interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happyness.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#55. A flower is relatively small ... Still in a way-nobody sees a flower-so I said to myself-I'll paint it big.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#56. Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small it takes time - we haven't time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#57. I look at my work and make up my mind about it. After that, neither flattery nor criticism matters to me.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#58. I'd been taught to paint like other people, and I thought, what's the use? I couldn't do any better than they, or even as well. I was just adding to the brushpile. So I quit.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#59. I don't really know where I got my artists idea. The scraps of what I remember do not explain to me where it came from. I only know that by this time it was definitely settled in my mind.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#60. Making your unknown known is the important thing - and keeping the unknown always beyond you - catching - crystalizing your simpler clearer vision of life - only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead - that you must always keep working to grasp ...
Georgia O'Keeffe
#61. I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#62. I know I am unreasonable about people but there are so many wonderful people whom I can't take the time to know.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#63. I wish so much to go that I almost wish I had never been there.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#65. I never knew [Alfred Stieglitz] to make a trip anywhere to photograph. His eye was in him, and he used it on anything that was nearby. Maybe that way he was always photographing himself.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#66. Whether the flower or the color is the focus I do not know. I do know the flower is painted large to convey my experience with the flower - and what is my experience if it is not the color?
Georgia O'Keeffe
#67. In the evening I go up in the desert and spend hours watching the sun go down, just enjoying it, and every day I go out and watch it again. I draw some and there is a little painting and so the days go by.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#68. I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#69. I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#70. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#71. I have things in my head that are not like what anyone taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me,so natural to my way of being and thinking.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#72. I am not an exponent of expressionism. I don't know exactly what that means, but I don't like the sound of it. I dislike cults and isms. I want to paint in terms of my own thinking and feeling.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#74. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it. (Life, March 1, 1968)
Georgia O'Keeffe
#75. I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way ... things I had no words for.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#76. It always seems to me that so few people live - they just seem to exist and I don't see any reason why we shouldn't live always - til we die physically ...
Georgia O'Keeffe
#77. We'd make love. Afterwards he would take photographs of me. (On modeling for Alfred Stieglitz)
Georgia O'Keeffe
#78. You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#79. Anyone who doesn't feel the crosses simply doesn't get that country.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#80. If one could only reproduce nature, and always with less beauty than the original, why paint at all?
Georgia O'Keeffe
#81. All the earth colours of the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of badlands ...
Georgia O'Keeffe
#82. I've been terrified my whole life but it never kept me from doing a single thing.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#83. It's not enough to be nice in life. You've got to have nerve.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#84. Marks on paper are free - free speech - press - pictures all go together I suppose.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#85. One cannot be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#86. I took back a barrel of bones to New York. They were my symbols of the desert, but nothing more. I haven't seen enough to think of any other symbolism. The skulls were there and I could say something with them.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#88. The simple fact of yourself ... there it is ... just you ... no excitement about it ... a very simple fact ... the only thing you have ... keep it as clear as you can.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#89. Artists and religionists are never far apart, they go to the sources of revelation for what they choose to experience and what they report is the degree of their experiences. Intellect
wishes to arrange - intuition wishes to accept.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#90. When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I'm gone.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#91. War is killing the individual in it unless he has learned livingness - if he had it he wouldn't be a good soldier.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#92. I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#93. I believe an artist is the last person in the world who can afford to be affected.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#94. When people read erotic symbols into my painting, they're really thinking about their own affairs.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#96. I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see - and I don't.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#97. I find that I have painted my life - things happening in my life - without knowing.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#98. You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#99. I like to convey the idea that art is important in everyday life.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#100. I have a single track mind. I work on an idea for a long time. It's like getting acquainted with a person, and I don't get acquainted easily.
Georgia O'Keeffe
