Anne Truitt Quotes

Love ... is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.

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

The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own intimate sensitivity.

No one questions the fact that verbal language has to be learned, but the commonplaceness of visual experience betrays art; people tend to assume that, because they can see, they can see art.

Artists have no choice but to express their lives.

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

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

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

I have no home but me.

I have slowly come to realize that a family is composed of people who are teaching one another.

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

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.

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

I come to the point of using steel, and simply cannot. It's like the marriage proposal of a perfectly eligible man who just isn't loveable. It is wood I love.

The shape of my work's development becomes a little clearer every time I am forced to articulate it.

I had forgotten what sleep is like - a kingdom all its own.

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.

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.

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

It is ultimately character that underwrites art.

Generosity is often the stalking horse of control.

I have been flooded with color on the inside, drab on the outside.

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

Humility is the daughter of truth.

The art of being officially old seems to lie in cooperative submission.

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

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

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.

The hallmark of a decision in line with one’s inner development is a feeling of having laid down a burden and picked up a more natural responsibility.