Lgbt People

"She painted what she painted because she had to, because she was passionate about it. She didn't care at all if people bought her paintings. As she said, she painted her reality."

"Writing from bed is a time-honored disabled way of being an activist and a cultural worker. It's one the mainstream doesn't often acknowledge but whose lineage stretches from Frida Kahlo painting in bed to Grace Lee Boggs writing in her wheelchair at age 98. (preface)"

"Although I knew about Frida Kahlo back in Mexico, she really wasn’t that famous back home. But in the US she was a superhero. Everyone used her as a symbol for many different things. And I started realizing that I wasn’t sure that the sense some people have about Frida in the U.S. was the one I had from her. I wanted to learn more about Frida Kahlo through my own perspective. So I had this idea for a while about creating a book about her. I also wanted to because she was a woman who, in the creation of her own identity, from how she dressed to what she did to her political activities—all of those things, were part of her own pride in who she was. And it was through creating this identity that she also was creating art. It wasn’t only because of her painting [that I was inspired]. She was very proud of her Mexican heritage, and she showed it in the way she dressed and all sorts of things. I had just come to the United States, a place where I didn’t know how I felt about my identity as a Mexican woman, and it was her pride that had an impact on me and made me realize that I had things to be proud of too."

"If I were a painter, I'd be Frida Kahlo."

"Who is a revolutionary woman? A revolutionary woman wants change, not mere cosmetic change but change to the status quo, and she is willing to sacrifice to make this happen. We have some extraordinary examples: Sojourner Truth, Las Adelitas, Frida Kahlo, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Dorothy Day, Malala Yousafzai, Coretta Scott King, and others."

"The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb."

"A very common theme in [Kahlo's] work was fertility, fertility, fertility.. .In one painting, she draws pelvic bones. In another, a uterus is directly drawn. Another is showing the fetus. She's telling us what she's thinking about, but she never put her finger on what exactly was wrong."

"It's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you."

"We [Frida and Diego] moved from the house on Reforma [street] to Coyoacán, and that had an enormous influence on me. How we painted the house and the Mexican furniture, all that influenced my painting a lot. While still on Reforma, I painted a self-portrait [Self-portrait 'Time Flies', 1929] that is owned by Morillo Safa. Once in Coyoacán I began to make paintings with backgrounds and Mexican things in them. I painted the portraits of Hale's sister.. ..and the one of Diego, which I did not finish [this painting is lost and was never documented before]. Those three paintings, who knows where they are. Mirillo Safa has the third self-portrait [her Self-portrait of 1930], showing me bald and sitting in a cane chair. (1950)"

"One Sunday, Diego came to the house to see my paintings and critiqued all of them in a very clear manner, and he told me all the possibilities he saw in them. Then I painted two or three things, which are around the house, that to me seem very influenced by him [circa 1928]. They are portraits of thirteen- or fourteen-year-old kids.. .In 1929, I joined the Communist Party, I got married to Diego, and I had my first abortion. In that year I painted a portrait of Cristina Moya.. ..and other drawings that Morillo Safa [her main patron] owns. The unfinished [self-]portrait of my first abortion was my first Surrealist painting ['Frida and the Caesarean', she painted in 1929] but not completely. I have it [at home]. (1950)"

"I returned to school [after the bus accident], but I felt very sore and had little strength. I took my paintings to Diego [Rivera], and he liked them a lot, most of all the self-portrait. But of the rest he told me that I was influenced by Doctor Atl [a Mexican painter and revolutionary] and by Montenegro, and that I should try to paint whatever I wanted without being influenced by anyone else. That impressed me a lot, and I began to paint that I believed in. Then the friendship and almost courtship with Diego began. I would go to see him paint in the afternoon, and afterwards he would take me home by bus or in a Fordcito – a little Ford that he had – and he would kiss me. (1950)"

"José Clemente Orozco [became later a famous Mexican painter as well] and I would travel on the same trolley from Coyoacán to Mexico City, and I would carry his papers. We became pals, and I invited him to the house. I had painted four or five things when he visited, and he gave me a hug and said I had a lot of talent, and he chatted on about the horrors of Diego [Rivera]. There was beginning to be talk about Diego; that he had returned from Russia and was giving talks on on Russian theater and art. I would go to hear him. Afterwards, he began to paint at the Prepa. [Escuela Prepatoria] and later at the Secretaríade Educación. I was studying at the Prepa, but the [bus] accident [in 1925] messed me up. (1950)"

"Papa painted small landscapes by the river in Coyoacán, and copied sentimental paintings in watercolour and oil. Afterwards, he gave me a little box of paints that belonged to him. Ángel Salas gave me a small book that told me how to prepare the canvases, and I made them smooth, smooth. The courtship with Gómez Arias lasted from 1922 until 1925, when the bus crushed us both. Gómez Arias brought me books on painting and painters from Europe. These were the first books on art that fell into my hands. (1950)"

"I was already interested in painting when I was about twelve. I was about fifteen when I began to draw. I have the first drawing, a self-portrait that I did in 1925 [in fact she did this self-portrait in 1927 and gave it to a grade-school friend and wrote above her drawn head: 'Here I am sending you my portrait, so you will remember me'] I began to paint after the [bus] accident, I made the self-portrait with the clouds [1926] and the portraits of Adriana Kahlo, Lira, Alicia Galant, Christina Kahlo and Agustin Olmedo. All, more or less, are from the same period. With the last ones, I was wearing the cast corset [because of her injury by the bus accident in 1925 with her boy-friend Gomez Arias]. I would get out of the bed and paint at night. (1950)"

"I first met Diego [who became later her husband] while he was painting the amphitheater [at the Escuela National Preparatoria, where Rivera was painting the mural 'La Créación', 1922 -1923] and I would really cherish going to see him paint. Orozco [famous Mexican painter] was also painting [murals] in the Prepa, and I remember one time a group of kids wanted to scratch the paintings of Diego and Orozco.. .Every day we went for ice cream at a stand opposite the law school.. .Sometimes Diego himself would pass by, and we would tease him. One day they asked me who I wanted to marry, and I said I would not marry, but I did want to have a child by Diego Rivera. – (27 October 1950)"

"..when I had my imaginary friend I would look out of the small glass panes of the window and fill them with steam. Then, I would draw a little window and go out through it. Opposite our house, there was a milk store that was named Pinzon, and I would travel from the little window through the "o" in Pinzon, and from there into the center of the earth, where I had my friend, and we would dance and play.. .I do not remember my friend's house, and she had no name. She was like me in age. She had no face. The truth is, I do not remember if she had a face or not, and she was very lively. I could not describe her. (9 September 1950)"

"I remember the first time I was sick. I had gone to play with a boy, Luis Léon, and on the patio he threw a wooden log at my foot, and this was the pretext they used at home when my leg began to grow thin. I remember they said that it was a white tumor or paralysis. I missed a lot of school [Frida spent nine months in bed, and at seven she wore (polio) booties]. I do not remember a lot, but I continued jumping, only not with the right leg anymore. I developed a horrible complex, and I hide my leg. I wore thick wool socks onto the knee, with bandages underneath. This happened when I was seven years old, and my papa and my mama begun to spoil me a lot and to love me more. The foot leaned to the side, and I limped a little. This was during the period when I had my imaginary friend. (9 September 1950)"

"I was really ugly [circa 8 a 10 years old] and had an admiration complex for Christi [her beautiful sister]. They sent us tot the ous of senora Maria a Campos for instruction.. .I asked about the mysteries of the Bible, and I think I behaved badly so they sent me to a retreat. It was the usual thing: "to dedicate oneself mor to God".. ..it was a house where one spent about fifteen days.. .I asked the priest so many questions about how Christ was born, and was the virgin really a virgin, that they threw me out. (9 September 1950)"

"I was fascinated by Papa's studio [he was photographer]. I would help him wash, crop and press photos and afterwards sell them, when we were poor. When I was in Prepa, [following college] they would send me to help my father when he had epileptic attacks. After school I would go to his office, which was downtown, and accompany him everywhere. I would also do my homework there, and he would help me. I remember the fear that Papa's epileptic attacks make me feel. Christina and I would hide under the bed. (9 September 1950)"

"I hope the exit is joyful and I hope never to return."

"Pies, para qué los quiero Si tengo alas para volar."

"I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint."

"They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality."

"Since Trotsky came to Mexico I have understood his error. I was never a Trotskyist."

"I have suffered two grave accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar knocked me down... The other accident is Diego."

"His [Diego Rivera's] supposed mythomania is in direct relation to his tremendous imagination. That is to say, he is as much of a liar as the poets or as the children who have not yet been turned into idiots by school or mothers. I have heard him tell all kinds of lies: from the most innocent, to the most complicated stories about people whom his imagination combined in a fantastic situation or actions, always with a great sense of humor and a marvelous critical sense; but I have never heard him say a single stupid or banal lie. Lying, or playing at lying, he unmasks many people, he learns the interior mechanism of others, who are much more ingenuously liars than he, and the most curious thing about the supposed lies of Diego, is that in the long and short of it, those who are involved in the imaginary combination become angry, not because of the lie, but because of the truth contained in the lie, that always comes to the surface."

"I am a poor little deer."

"I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best."

"Until always and forever. Now in 1944. After all the hours lived through. The vectors continue in their original direction. Nothing stops them. With no more knowledge than live emotion. With no other wish than to go on until they meet. Slowly. With great unease, but with the certainty that all is guided by the "golden section". There is cellular arrangement. There is movement. There is light. All centers are the same. Folly doesn’t exist. We are the same as we were and as we will be. Not counting on idiotic destiny."

"I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim."

"I'll be in Detroit two more weeks. I would like to tell you every thing that happened to me since the last time we saw each other, but most of them are sad and you mustn't know sad things now. After all I shouldn't complain because I have been happy in many ways though. Diego is good to me, and you can't imagine how happy he has been working on the frescoes here. I have been painting a little too and that helped. I thought of you a lot and never forget your wonderful hands and the color of your eyes. I will see you soon. I am sure that in New York I will be much happier. If you still in the hospital when I come back I will bring you flowers."

"I’m more and more convinced it’s only through communism that we can become human."

"A little while ago, not much more than a few days ago, I was a child who went about in a world of colors, of hard and tangible forms. Everything was mysterious and something was hidden, guessing what it was was a game for me. If you knew how terrible it is to know suddenly, as if a bolt of lightning elucidated the earth. Now I live in a painful planet, transparent as ice; but it is as if I had learned everything at once in seconds."

"Extensive whiteness drowned All sense of space. We tramped through Static, glaring days, Time's suspended blank."

"Our single purpose was to walk through snow With faces swung to their prodigious North Like compass iron."

"Talk to Stephen Spender. He is an intelligent young man [ aged twenty-one ] with wild blue eyes and a bad complexion. He takes his work and poetry with immense seriousness, and talks for hours about whether he is more fitted to be a poet than a novelist. He is not conceited so much as self-preoccupied. He is absolutely determined to become a leading writer. A nice and vital young man whom we both liked ."

""But do you really think I'm any good?" a nervous Stephen Spender asked WH Auden, some six weeks after they'd met. "Of course," Auden said. "Because you are so infinitely capable of being humiliated." Humiliation was Spender's lifetime companion. Few poets have been more savagely reviewed. And none has nurtured a greater sense of inadequacy. This is the man who, having dismissed John Lehmann as a potential lover because he was a "failed version of myself", adds: "but I also regarded myself as a failed version of myself." With Spender, self-deprecation reaches comic extremes of self-abasement."

"For Stephen Spender, the Spanish Civil War in 1936 was a war of classes, on an international scale; the capitalistic class, backed by international imperialism, against the democratic will of 80 percent of the Spanish people. In 1990, the reality of Latin America is not very different from Spender's Spain. In Latin America, wars are class wars, on one side the oligarchy linked to the military class and the great capital and, on the other, the poor people, the ones who have nothing to lose. Fear of communism in 1936 is still flagrant in 1990. And more absurd, more mediocre."

"In 1960, Spender was renowned as a figure from the past — a poet of the nineteen-thirties — and his work was deeply out of fashion... Most of us had been told in school that of all the thirties poets Spender was the one whose reputation had been most inflated. He lacked the complexity of Auden, the erudition of Louis MacNeice, the cunning of Cecil Day-Lewis. He was the one who had believed the slogans — "Oh young men oh young comrades" — and, after the war, the one who had recanted most shamefacedly. He was the fairest of fair game..."

"You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated."

"Both Hopkins and Lawrence were religious not just in the ritualistic sense but in the sense of being obsessed with the word — the word made life and truth — with the need to invent a language as direct as religious utterance. Both were poets, but outside the literary fashions of their time. Both felt that among the poets of their time was an absorption in literary manners, fashions and techniques which separated the line of the writing from that of religious truth. Both felt that the modern situation imposed on them the necessity to express truth by means of a different kind of poetic writing from that used in past or present. Both found themselves driven into writing in a way which their contemporaries did not understand or respond to yet was inevitable to each in his pursuit of truth. Here of course there is a difference between Hopkins and Lawrence, because Hopkins in his art was perhaps over-worried, over-conscientious, whereas Lawrence was an instinctive poet who, in his concern for truth, understood little of the problems of poetic form, although he held strong views about them."

"The immediate reaction of the poets who fought in the war was cynicism... The war dramatized for them the contrast between the still-idealistic young, living and dying on the unalteringly horrible stage-set of the Western front, with the complacency of the old at home, the staff officers behind the lines. In England there was violent anti-German feeling; but for the poet-soldiers the men in the trenches on both sides seemed united in pacific feelings and hatred of those at home who had sent them out to kill each other."

"Critics of visual arts and of music describe in words — that is to say, a system of signs other than those made by brushes on canvas or chisels into stone or notes of music — those characteristics of painting or sculpture or music which can be described or analysed. Visual artists and composers can disregard critics on the ground that the medium of verbal criticism bears so indirect a relation to the medium in which they make something. Poets are in a different situation. With the development of so-called scientific methods of criticism they are made ever conscious that criticism of poetry is in the same medium of work as the art which they practise. “Close analysis” is useful to critics and readers. But for the poet there is the danger of disintegration of poetry into paraphrase, examination of technique, influences, all analysed in the language of criticism."

"The prose method might be described as that where the writer provides a complete description of all those material factors in the environment which condition his characters. The poetic method sees the centre of consciousness as the point where all that is significant in the surrounding world becomes aware and transformed; the prose method requires a description of that world in order to explain the characteristics of the people in it. The hero of the poetic method is Rimbaud; of the prose method, Balzac."

"I am for neither West nor East, but for myself considered as a self — one of the millions who inhabit the earth... If it seems absurd that an individual should set up as a judge between these vast powers, armed with their superhuman instruments of destruction I can reply that the very immensity of the means to destroy proves that judging and being judged does not lie in these forces. For supposing that they achieved their utmost and destroyed our civilization, whoever survived would judge them by a few statements. a few poems, a few témoignages [testimonies] surviving from all the ruins, a few words of those men who saw outside and beyond the means which were used and all the arguments which were marshaled in the service of those means. Thus I could not escape from myself into some social situation of which my existence was a mere product, and my witnessing a willfully distorting instrument. I had to be myself, choose and not be chosen... But to believe that my individual freedom could gain strength from my seeking to identify myself with the "progressive" forces was different from believing that my life must be an instrument of means decided on by political leaders. I came to see that within the struggle for a juster world, there is a further struggle between the individual who cares for long-term values and those who are willing to use any and every means to gain immediate political ends — even good ends. Within even a good social cause, there is a duty to fight for the pre-eminence of individual conscience. The public is necessary, but the private must not be abolished by it; and the individual must not be swallowed up by the concept of the social man."

"Unless, governor, teacher, inspector, visitor, This map becomes their window and these windows That shut upon their lives like catacombs, Break O break open 'till they break the town And show the children green fields and make their world Run azure on gold sands and let their tongues Run naked into books, the white and green leaves open History is theirs whose language is the sun."

"Surely, Shakespeare is wicked and the map a bad example With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal — For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones. All of their time and space are foggy slum. So blot their maps with slums as big as doom."

"Far far from gusty waves these children's faces. Like rootless weeds the torn hair round their paleness."

"All the lessons learned, unlearned; The young, who learned to read, now blind Their eyes with an archaic film; The peasant relapses to a stumbling tune Following the donkey`s bray; These only remember to forget. But somewhere some word presses On the high door of a skull and in some corner Of an irrefrangible eye Some old man memory jumps to a child — Spark from the days of energy. And the child hoards it like a bitter toy."

"All the posters on the walls All the leaflets in the streets Are mutilated, destroyed or run in rain, Their words blotted out with tears, Skins peeling from their bodies In the victorious hurricane."