Etel Adnan Quotes

There are not millions of deaths. It happens millions of times that someone dies.

My writing and my paintings do not have a direct connection in my mind. But I am sure they influence each other in the measure that everything we do is linked to whatever we are, which includes whatever we have done or are doing.

Dear soul,
am I only because I have been?

Do what your inner soul tells you to do, regardless of any money or success it will bring you.

Morning. Vast. Imprecision. Fog has covered everything in gray
absolute. This has lasted. Doubt looms over the mind. Absence
is harder to accept than death.

Usually, I am a compulsive person, and I need - sometimes urgently - to paint ... Painting is close to poetry, is a kind of poetry expressed visually. It has to be spontaneous, rapid - at least in my case.

Spring is dangerous, like love. And love survives the lovers.

Eternity is non evident. There's this endless rotation of the
sun in the skull, the stillness outside, and a storm within.
At least a river is always flowing in some part of the country.
Winds, always gathering speed, shatter the order of things.
We return home, in tears.

There are moments when
the past ceases to be a form
of the present.
Rain and tears
look alike.

In the green escape of my palace, over a bridge, under a canopy of opalescent light, through there, between dark branches and their shivering leaves, I'm lost in the scent of yellow roses, arrested by the range's filtering light.

I love contemporary poetry because it moves between what we call poetry and what we call philosophy. It joins these fields and makes writing more natural, as in how it is lived in the person. We don't separate thinking from feeling in real life, so why should we separate it in writing?

Once I put down a color, I never cover it up. If you are born a musician, why become a banker?

Colours exist for me as entities in themselves, as metaphysical beings.

Places are part of nature, of the bigger picture. We are interrelated. When we contemplate them in their own right, they can sometimes change our lives; they can become spiritual experiences.

If you aren't here your heart won't break in the same way.

Abstract art was the quivalent of poetic expression; I didn't need to use words,but colors and lines. I didn't need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression.

I always had a few people who liked what I did, and that was enough.

I write what I see; I paint what I am.

I love Nicolas de Stael particularly, and my work can remind people of him. But looked at attentively, our works are not similar at all.

We were taught to think that Paris was the center of the universe.

Mount Tamalpais became my house. For Cezanne, Sainte-Victoire was no longer a mountain. It was an absolute. It was painting.