Susan Vreeland Quotes

Whatever it is that can help to bring God close is something to be revered. ~ Susan Vreeland

Erasmus says if you must be hanged let it be on fair gallows. ~ Susan Vreeland

She sat very still, listening to a stream gurgling, the breeze soughing through upper branches, the melodious kloo-klack of ravens, the nyeep-nyeep of nuthatches - all sounds chokingly beautiful. She felt she could hear the cool clean breath of growing things - fern fronds, maple leaves, white trillium petals, tree trunks, each in its rightful place. ~ Susan Vreeland

I wanted to keep a Gothic cathedral alive in my heart. ~ Susan Vreeland

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

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

Overblown responsibility was a part of my preoccupation with myself. ~ Susan Vreeland

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

A hard choice. Water or books. Hmm. One could always have wine instead. ~ Susan Vreeland

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

Now he knew ... that there was nothing so vital as paying attention, and perfecting the humble offices of love. ~ Susan Vreeland

What could she possibly have done that was so heinous as to earn her a lifetime of self-mortification? No one short of a tyrant deserved such unremitting agony. I cried there with her, for her, for Eve, for sorrows past, for sorrows yet to come. I put my pencil away. It was wrong to draw live pain. If there had been an artist at Bethany, it would have been wrong to intrude his chalk or charcoal on Mary Magdalene's weeping as she washed Jesus' feet. Some things were too raw for art until time dulled their sharpness. ~ Susan Vreeland

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

What the world calls failure, I call learning. ~ Susan Vreeland

The company, Tiffany Studios, ended up in bankruptcy in 1930 - early '30s. ~ Susan Vreeland

Maybe that's what love was
walking willingly into the unknown for the sake of the other. ~ Susan Vreeland

I suppose it's easier for most writers to create and vivify characters of their own gender. ~ Susan Vreeland

Think hard before you begin, then enter the work. ~ Susan Vreeland

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

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

Love is so easily bruised by the necessity of making choices. ~ Susan Vreeland

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

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

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

Painting. Carefully, I took down the goat, the chicken, and me and ~ Susan Vreeland

In the end, it's only the moments that we have. ~ Susan Vreeland

'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

She plucked a raspberry. Sweet juice, sweet pleasure. Within the tangle of tendrils, inside a blossom, a tiny bead was kisses and blessed by the sun, from which it took in light and warmth and heaven's rain imbued with the richness of the soil of France. All of the elements of the river world helped that bead to expand and multiply into sheer casings for sweet pulp, wedge together in a knobby globe until it released its juice in her mouth ~ Susan Vreeland

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

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

Color has always been important to me, ever since my first deluxe box of Crayolas. ~ Susan Vreeland

I pored over art books and absorbed the placidness of Monet's garden, the sparkling color of the Impressionists, the strength and solidity of Michelangelo's figures showing the titanic power of humans at one with God, Jan Vermeer's serene Dutch women bathed in gorgeous honey-colored light ... My conviction grew that art was stronger than death. ~ Susan Vreeland

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

Things that have been lost and then found are doubly precious, don't you think. People too. ~ Susan Vreeland

It was only after I began to write fiction that I found a way to connect with painting. ~ Susan Vreeland

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

Things will change, Father. They must. And art can help create the change. ~ Susan Vreeland

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

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

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

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

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

When I see Tiffany windows in churches across the United States, I get a sense of spiritual upliftment from that. ~ Susan Vreeland

If you want to preach, young man, you ought to wear some kind of clerical costume so people would be warned. In my mind, there are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them. I hate le misérabilisme. I'm in the shining business, not the darkening business. ~ Susan Vreeland

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

I could say diamonds are a girl's best friend, and that never changes. But the taste for art did change. ~ Susan Vreeland

I've come to think that if doing something simple or silly can give a person pleasure, then, by God, do it ~ Susan Vreeland

I remember being disappointed when Papa had shown me Caravaggio's Judith. She was completely passive while she was sawing through a man's neck. Caravaggio gave all the feeling to the man. Apparently, he couldn't imagine a woman to have a single thought. I wanted to paint her thoughts, if such a thing were possible
determination and concentration and belief in the absolute necessity of the act. The fate of her people resting on her shoulders ... ~ Susan Vreeland

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

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

No matter where life takes you,' she said, 'the place where you stand at any moment is holy ground. ~ Susan Vreeland

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

A woman can't stay hard when all around her is loveliness. ~ Susan Vreeland

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

If a person loves something above all else, if he values the work of his heart and hands, then he should naturally, without hesitation, pour into it his whole soul, undivided and pure. Great art demands nothing less. ~ Susan Vreeland

Where there is no human connection, there is no compassion. Without compassion, then community, commitment, loving-kindness, human understanding, and peace all shrivel. Individuals become isolated, the isolated turn cruel, and the tragic hovers in the forms of domestic and civil violence. Art and literature are antidotes to that. ~ Susan Vreeland

Art history looks at art works and the people who have created them. ~ Susan Vreeland

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

Work is love made plain, whether man's work or woman's work. ~ Susan Vreeland

Everybody works ... That's what life is. Work and a little play and a lot of prayer. ~ Susan Vreeland

It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials
I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered
it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments. ~ Susan Vreeland

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

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

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

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

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

I would never ever, ever, ever, ever do it again [All My Children]. It was the scariest thing I've ever done. I have such respect for people who do it, who can do it. What happened was they caught me at a good moment. I could use the money and this came along and it was with Susan and I thought, Susan Lucci. I have to do this. ~ Richard Masur

Raising parent awareness on how to support their students to be safe, responsible and discerning users of technology continues to be a challenge. ~ Susan Mann

It is often asserted that as woman has always been man's slave
subject
inferior
dependent, under all forms of government and religion, slavery must be her normal condition. This might have some weight had not the vast majority of men also been enslaved for centuries to kings and popes, and orders of nobility, who, in the progress of civilization, have reached complete equality. ~ Susan B. Anthony

I can say that paintings are prayers, they have to do with anything that makes you wish for more that what everyday life provides. ~ Susan Rothenberg

One of the risks of a public trial is a public verdict. ~ Susan Estrich

If there was no Hollywood, no next movie, no deal at Warner Brothers, no place in Malibu or Venice, I would still be really happy. ~ Susan Downey

What I find is with all due deference to - deference to our male colleagues, that women's styles tend to be more collaborative. ~ Susan Collins

When your heart speaks, take good notes. ~ Susan Campbell

I believe in small government and people taking care of themselves. ~ Susan Olsen

Whether a vision
or a waking dream
don't turn away
from it or ignore it.
Taste it with your heart;
feel it with your soul. ~ Susan Bocinec Terry

Sometimes if you want something badly enough, you make it happen through sheer force of will. ~ Susan Wiggs

There was something about a man with a shovel, and the sweat on his neck might as well have been chocolate sauce. It wasn't fair. Brains and brawns should be two separate categories, not bundled into one irresistible package. She needed to pull herself together before she went after him with a spoon. But where to start? ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Without thinking, she reached down and grabbed his wrist. Holding his hand still, she thrust her hips forward and back, finding the right pace until the heavy tension returned, and she felt the telltale contractions begin again.
He swore softly. "Can you do that while I'm inside of you?"
"Absolutely."
She pulled his hand free and pressed the condom into his palm. "Can you put this on in the dark?"
He chuckled. "With you as motivation, I could probably put it on after I was dead. ~ Susan Mallery

Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and an object of surveillance (for rulers). ~ Susan Sontag

If you help me find my sister, you can have these back. I saved them for you."
"Thanks," he croaks, surveying the wings. "They'll look great on my wall. ~ Susan Ee

Oh, aye. A bit of mist in the air might bring the selkies out to play. The selkies are seal people, you know. ~ Susan Wiggs

I've had a dozen novels published and have made far more than a dozen mistakes. Which is why Randy Susan Meyers and I wrote a guidebook to help authors avoid making our mistakes. ~ M.J. Rose

Susan had decided to sit by the pool at the hotel with a copy of a book by Alice Miller called The Drama of the Gifted Child. ~ Robert B. Parker

But you are telling me, Susan, that the 'Society for Humanity' is right; and that Mankind has lost its own say in its future.' 'It never had any, really. It was always at the mercy of economic and sociological forces it did not understand--at the whims of climate, and the fortunes of war. ~ Isaac Asimov

We will need to move fast. Are you up for that?"
She snorted, and when Aeduan glanced back, he found her face had softened. The slightest - almost imperceptible - glint of mischief hovered there now.
"I think we both know the answer to that, Bloodwitch." She stalked past him, her chin high. Challenging. "The question will be if you can keep up."
Then she broke into a run, Aeduan broke into a run after her. ~ Susan Dennard

We don't see the Bible as it is itself. We see it in relation to a lot of people who surround it. And because we don't care for some of them, we think we shouldn't care for it. ~ Susan Glaspell

Are zombie girls allowed to talk?"
"If they're cute and willing to do zombie-girl mud fights"
"Duuude. Right on."
"That's a disgusting image" ...
"It's not liked we'd pick the decayed ones, Penryn. Just … fresh from the dead."
"Only, with ripped clothes and stuff."
"And hungry for breeeeasts."
"He means brains."
"That's exactly what I meant. ~ Susan Ee

Finally, when she was shaking so much that he staggered with the violence of her pleasure, he drove her back against the wall and took her as she stood, careless of the clothes that bunched between them, oblivious to everything but the primitive, driving force that had conquered him far more devastatingly than he had conquered her. ~ Susan Napier

I was conscious of the fact that it could be to my disadvantage to marry a white guy - that some folks would hold that against me. ~ Susan Rice

and grinned. "The lady ~ Susan May Warren

Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently. ~ Susan Sontag

For ever and ever, we say when we are young, or in our prayers. Twice, we say it. Old One, do we not? For ever and ever ... so that a thing may be for ever, a life or a love or a quest, and yet begin again, and be for ever just as before. And any ending that may seem to come is not truly an ending, but an illusion. For Time does not die, Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time. ~ Susan Cooper

Where there is always striving, always there is strife as well. Sometimes to be in one place is good. To be still." Leif ~ Susan Fanetti

Not only should the conventional "rules" of marriage not apply necessarily to individual wives, but the euphoria of Phase One is old news. We being to learn that while nothing is as good as it seems, nothing is quite as dire as it appears. ~ Susan Shapiro Barash

Feminists who want to censor what they regard as harmful pornography have essentially the same motivation as other would-be censors: They want to use the power of the state to accomplish what they have been unable to achieve in the marketplace of ideas and images. The impulse to censor places no faith in the possibilities of democratic persuasion. ~ Susan Jacoby