Anne Truitt Quotes

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

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.

Their [artists'] essential effort is to catapult themselves wholly, without holding back one bit, into a course of action without having any idea where they will end up. They are like riders who gallop into the night, eagerly leaning on their horse's neck, peering into a blinding rain. And they have to do it over and over again.

When I speak now, my experience in art wells up so articulately that I am surprised even while I am talking. I move around a podium as easily as if it were my living room and although I am keyed up I am not anxious. I feel as if I were doing what I should be doing - the feeling I have when intent in my studio.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I notice that I have to pay careful attention in order to listen to others with an openness that allows them to be as they are, or as they think themselves to be. The shutters of my mind habitually flip open and click shut, and these little snaps form into patterns I arrange for myself. The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.

In the range of my character at any given moment, I have acted in the only way it seemed to me I could have acted. This in no way means that I have done what was right; only what was possible for me. Sometimes I have done what I knew was wrong, and have rationalized. But rationalization is a form of desperation. It takes kindness to forgive oneself for one's life.

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

We tend to mix genders when we arrange ourselves around a table for meetings. A sort of accommodation is made by the men for the women: they make space for us. they are ever-so-slightly polite, we are ever-so-slightly grateful. When we stand up at the end of a meeting, we all give ourselves a metaphorical shake that is only partly the relief of having concluded our business: we are all released from the effort of fitting ourselves together.
When men speak in these meetings, women relax; when women speak, men grow tense. I have the impression that they never know what a woman is going to say, whereas they are reasonably sure what a man will address himself to and how he will do it. So are the women; for them, too, men tend to be predictable. Women listen to women with a different kind of attention, and part of it may be loyalty to our gender; we want all of us to do well, as if we have the esprit de corps of subalterns among generals.

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

I am, and I am going to be, the kind of person I have trained myself to be. In a way that almost amounts to just retribution, I am stuck with the results of all my choices.

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

vulnerability is a guardian of integrity

It occurred to me that I could use the energy I had been putting into endurance to change my life. Yet the concept of brunt, of accepting and enduring, still seems to me to have a kind of nobility. It is, perhaps, less intelligent, but there is a stubborn selfhood about it that is dear to me. It can be, quite literally, the only way to survive.

Our society is monstrously disjunctive, at once so efficient in war and so inefficient in caring for the welfare of its members. It is frightening to see people rooting in garbage pails on streets, living in cardboard crates under bridges, while their government wages war. Even when there is an emergency in a household, decent parents do not forget to feed the children.

This life, a gift of grace for an unknown reason, must be lived purely, because at death we return with its accruements to our source. Life is entrusted to us, does not belong to us, and has to be restored in honorable condition. We are responsible for this trust, and must live with this fact in mind.

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.

Generosity is often the stalking horse of control.