Vreeland Quotes

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

Of course I was always mad about the ballet russe, mad about it! ~ Diana Vreeland

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

How boring to copy the past
with all the magnificence of today and tomorrow. ~ Diana Vreeland

No one had a better sense of luxury than Coco Chanel, She really had the spirit of the 20th Century. ~ Diana Vreeland

I once heard someone say, I shall die very young. How young? I don't know. Maybe seventy, maybe eighty, maybe ninety. But I shall be very young. ~ Diana 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 loathe narcissism, but I approve of vanity. ~ Diana Vreeland

Peanut butter is the greatest invention since Christianity, ~ Diana Vreeland

I am not really sure that Diana Vreeland did Yves Saint Laurent a favor, as opposed to the world, by putting that exhibition at the Met in 1983. Because I'm sure that Saint Laurent started looking back at his own work. You see that with artists, don't you? Once they get their first retrospective, it's really hard for them to push ahead. ~ Suzy Menkes

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

The red library is Sui's tribute to fashion maven Diana Vreeland, who served as editor for Harper's Bazaar (1939-1962) and Vogue (1963-1961). My most precious collection is my bound Vogue magazines, .. and they're kind of like my Bible. I look at them all the time when I'm trying to inspire myself for a collection. ~ Anna Sui

Being vulgar is fine, but oh please just don't be boring. ~ Diana Vreeland

No one knows how hard one works. ~ Diana 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

If you had a bump on your nose, it made no difference so long as you had a marvelous body & good carriage. You held your head high, & you were a beauty You knew how to water-ski, & how to take a jet plane fast in the morning, arrive anywhere, & be anyone when you got off. ~ Diana Vreeland

I read everything! I would have read the phone book if you put it in front of me. I just read. ~ Diana Vreeland

A good photograph was never what I was looking for. I like to have a point. I had to have a point or I didn't have a picture. This is what I've always found so fascinating about paparazzi pictures. They catch something unintended, on the wing ... they get that thing. It's the revelation of personality. ~ Diana Vreeland

The personality is a work of art. ~ Diana Vreeland

This world without a leopard ... I mean, who would want to be here?! ~ Diana Vreeland

The woman was Diana Vreeland, the high priestess of fashion and legendary fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar and editor-in-chief of Vogue. Dana paused, eyes wide. Well, perhaps she was a bit star-struck after all. ~ Lynn Steward

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

Chutney is marvelous. I'm mad about it. To me, it's very imperial. ~ Diana 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

In a Balenciaga you were the only woman in the room - no other woman existed. ~ Diana Vreeland

I've always remained totally myself, which is to say, without an idea ... of what to do. ~ Diana Vreeland

The bikini is the most important thing since the atom bomb. ~ Diana 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

I am tired of the cult of youth. The cultural rejection of old age, the stigmatization of wrinkles, grey hair, of bodies furrowed by the years. I am fascinated by Diana Vreeland, Georgia O'Keeffe and Louise Bourgeois, women who have let time embrace them without ever cheating. Society today condemns this, me, I celebrate it. ~ Tom Ford

The hottest thing in the world is to wear pants with stockings. ~ Diana 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

All people are meant to be creative in a certain way. What way? Perhaps I was cut out to be a wonderful housewife, with a marvelous sense of cooking, being with my friends, running a perfect house. But I am not ambitious towards anything. ~ Diana 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

The best thing about London is Paris, ~ Diana Vreeland

Balenciaga did the most delicious evening clothes. Clothes aren't delicious any more. ~ Diana Vreeland

Blue jeans are the most beautiful things since the gondola. ~ Diana Vreeland

Red is the great clarifier - bright and revealing. I can't imagine becoming bored with red - it would be like becoming bored with the person you love. ~ Diana Vreeland

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

I think allure is something around you, like a perfume or like a scent. It's like a memory ... it pervades. ~ Diana Vreeland

I've always had such wonderful opportunities, but I never made the effort, haven't put on the pressure. But I never took them. ~ Diana 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

You're not supposed to give people what they want, you're supposed to give them what they don't know that they want yet. ~ Diana 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

I like to indulge myself by sitting up late without having to do anything in the morning. ~ Diana Vreeland

Fashion needs incredible women, alive, stimulating, with style like Diana Vreeland. She is the most. The way she talks expresses all her values. ~ Gianni Versace

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

This is a weakness of the world. Someone thinks they've discovered something for the first time. They want to be authoritative about it. ~ Diana Vreeland

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

Why don't you have a room done up in every color green? This will take months, years, to collect, but it will be delightful-a melange of plants, green glass, green porcelains, and furniture covered in sad greens, gay greens, clear, faded, and poison greens? ~ Diana 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

For goodness sakes, beware of curls ... It is a great art to do them so that the girls not only look modern - but do not suddenly look very vulgar. ~ Diana Vreeland

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

It's only intelligent to wish to look after yourself properly. ~ Diana 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

Before even the technique, there is a dream. Chanel had it. The dream is everything. ~ Diana 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

<"To bewitch" is to me always slightly artificial as it is always put on
whereas witchery is a form of naturalness that some people can't help, and the world judges that they don't create it ... > November 15 1967 memo to Mrs. Loew Gross re "THE ROMANTIC POINT OF VIEW ~ Diana Vreeland

When I arrived in America, I had these very dark red nails which some people objected to, but then some people object to absolutely everything. ~ Diana Vreeland

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

I went to work to make money, not because I was bored. It was money that I wanted. ~ Diana Vreeland

If it's not there in fashion, fantasize it, ~ Diana Vreeland

You can see and feel everything in clothes. ~ Diana Vreeland

Unshined shoes are the end of civilization. ~ Diana Vreeland

No one cuts backs like he did. No one knows what a back is anymore. ~ Diana Vreeland

People who eat white bread have no dreams. ~ Diana Vreeland

Power has got to be the most intoxicating thing in the world - and of all forms of power the most intoxicating is fame. ~ Diana 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

The two greatest mannequins of the century were Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell - unquestionably. You just couldn't take a bad picture of those two old girls ~ Diana Vreeland

I was always fascinated by the absurdities and luxuries and the snobbism of the world that fashion magazines showed. Of course, it's not for everyone ... But I lived in that world, not only during my years in the magazines business but for years before, because I was always of that world
at least in my imagination. ~ Diana 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

All creations demand greenery of spirt. ~ Diana Vreeland

I've never met a leopard print I didn't like. ~ Diana Vreeland

What do I think about the way most people dress? Most people are not something one thinks about. ~ Diana Vreeland

Truth is a hell of a big point with me. Now I exaggerate - always. ~ Diana Vreeland

The only thing people are interested in is people. ~ Diana Vreeland

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

We all need a splash of bad taste. No taste is what I am against. ~ Diana 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

Vogue always did stand for people's lives. I mean, a new dress doesn't get you anywhere; it's the life you're living in the dress, and the sort of life you had lived before, and what you will do in it later. ~ Diana Vreeland

Never fear being vulgar, just boring, middle class or dull. ~ Diana Vreeland

Lighting is everything in a color. ~ Diana 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