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

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.

I have no home but me.

Artists have no choice but to express their lives.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The difference between men and women is inalienable. It is not a political fact, subject to cultural definition and redefinition, but a physical verity. We do truthfully experience our lives differently because our bodies are different. It is in what we do with our experience that we are the same. We feel, absorb and examine with the same intensity, and intense experience honestly examined informs the art of both sexes equally. ... The power of imagination illuminates all human lives in common.

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.

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

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.

It is ultimately character that underwrites art.

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

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

Artists have no choice but to express their lives. They have only, and that not always, a choice of process. This process does not change the essential content of their work in art, which can only be their life.

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

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.

Humility is the daughter of truth.

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