Women From The United States

"Anita, I have just come the comforting conclusion that I'll have to paint acres and acres of water color landscapes before I will look for even a passably fair one. After about ten attempts — I certainly have to laugh at myself — It's like feeling around in the dark — thought I knew what I was going to try to do but I find I don't — and guess I'll only find out by slaving away at it. I feel — like a wreck — Have been working like mad all day — and you know how deliciously disgusted with every thing one can be — when the sun begins to go down — and one has been working ones head off all day. It gives me the sensation I used to have when I was a youngster and was going away from home on the train — It is a very special sort of sick feeling."

"After I had been in Canada painting the wide white barns along the Saint Lawrence river, I thought how different the life of the Canadian farmer was from life in Cebolla. So I painted [in 1945] the Cebolla church which is so typical of that difficult life. I have always thought it one of my very good paintings, though its message is not as pleasant as many of the others."

"I find that I have painted my life, things happening in my life — without knowing. After painting the Shell and shingle [c, 1926] many times, I did a misty landscape of the mountain across the lake, and the mountain became the shape of the shingle — the mountain I saw out my window, the shingle on the table in my room. I did not notice that they were alike for a long time after they were painted."

"I painted 'the Shelton with Sunspots' [New York], in 1926. I went out one morning to look at it before I started to work and there was the optical illusion of a bite out of one side of the tower made by the sun, with sunspots against the building and against the sky. I made that painting beginning at the upper left and went off at the lower right without going back."

"The clean clear colours [of a Shanty farm] were in my head. But one day as I looked at the brown burned wood of the Shanty, I thought 'I can paint one of those dismal-coloured paintings like the men. I think just for fun I will try — all low-toned and dreary with the tree besides the door.' In my next show [c. 1923], 'The Shanty' went up. The men seemed to approve of it. They seemed to think that maybe I was beginning to paint.. ..that was my only low-toned dismal-coloured painting."

"Later I had two green ones [alligator pears] — not so perfect. I painted them several times [c. 1920] when the men [American modernist artists, a.o. Marsden Hartley ] didn't think much of what I was doing. They were all discussing Paul Cézanne, with long involved remarks about the 'plastic quality' of his form and colour. I was an outsider. My colour and form were not acceptable. It had nothing to do with Cézanne or anything else. I didn't understand what they were talking about why one colour was better than another.. .Years later when I finally got to Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire in the south of France, I remember sitting there thinking, 'How could they attach all those analytical remarks to anything he did with that mountain?' All those entire words piled on top of that poor little mountain seemed too much."

"Bement [her art teacher] told me things to read. He told me of exhibitions to go and see [c. 1917].. ..the two books that he told me to get were Jeromy Eddy 'Cubists and Post-impressionism' and Kandinsky 'On the Spiritual of Art'... It was some time before I really begun to use the ideas. I didn't start at until I was down in Carolina — alone — thinking things out for myself."

"There is not much sense in suffering, since drugs can be given for pain, itching, and other discomforts. The belief has long died that suffering here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. Suffering has lost its meaning."

"Learn to get in touch with silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences; all events are blessings given to us to learn from. There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub."

"We make progress in society only if we stop cursing and complaining about its shortcomings and have the courage to do something about them."

"We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering."

"As far as service goes, it can take the form of a million things. To do service, you don't have to be a doctor working in the slums for free, or become a social worker. Your position in life and what you do doesn't matter as much as how you do what you do."

"People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within."

"The Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross changed western cultural resistance to dealing with death, and the teaching of how to accept it... Kubler-Ross's best known contribution to the study, thanatology, that she had helped to create, was the five stages of dying people go through. She described them - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance - in her bestseller On Death And Dying (1969), written in two months. Not everyone experiences all five, she cautioned, but at least two are always present. The definition, reached after scores of interviews with people facing imminent death, helped the medical profession to deal with a factor it had long refused to acknowledge, especially in the US... She wrote more than 20 books.. A firm believer in a god and the life hereafter, she became fascinated with near-death experiences and an advocate for people's stories of seeing a shining light and familiar faces, before being brought back from the brink."

"Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth."

"Those who have been immersed in the tragedy of massive death during wartime, and who have faced it squarely, never allowing their senses and feelings to become numbed and indifferent, have emerged from their experiences with growth and humanness greater than that achieved through almost any other means."

"It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it."

"Those who have the strength and the love to sit with a dying patient in the silence that goes beyond words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body."

"Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever."

"Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death."

"This shared concern with continuity accounts for a good part of the affinity I feel with Schoenberg, an affinity I have openly claimed in drawing from him both the title and the subtitle of the present volume. To me, as to Schoenberg, such continuity constitutes important evidence that the essentially aesthetic act of constructing a 'text,' whether on paper or in one's professional life, has been subjected to rational restraints, in all the Kantian senses of 'rationality.' From this viewpoint, continuity is valued as a sign that a text has been carefully constructed to meet rigorous standards not only of formal coherence but also of logical precision and, espeically crucial, of moral scrupulousness."

"For me... the notion of an intimate relationship between music and society functions not as a distant goal but as a starting point of great immediacy, and not as an hypothesis but as an assumption. It functions as an idea about a relationship which in turn allows the examination of that relationship from many points of view and its exploration in many directions. It is an idea that generates studies the goal of which (or at least one important goal of which) is to articulate something essential about why any particular music is the way it is in particular, that is, to achieve insight into the character of its identity."

"Attachment to spiritual things is... just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else."

"In youth, we run into difficulties. In old age, difficulties run into us."

"Anger begins with folly, and ends with repentance."

"You don't always get what you ask for, but you never get what you don't ask for... unless it's contagious!"

"Christians should never fail to sense the operation of an angelic glory. It forever eclipses the world of demonic powers, as the sun does a candle's light."

"I needed to sing — desperately. My voice poured out more easily because I was no longer singing for anyone's approval; I was beyond caring about the public's reaction, I just wanted to enjoy myself. … I had found a kind of serenity, a new maturity, as a result of my childrens' problems. I didn't feel better or stronger than anyone else but it seemed no longer important whether everyone loved me or not — more important now was for me to love them. Feeling that way turns your whole life around; living becomes the act of giving."

"A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment."

"Everything you need you already have. You are complete right now, you are a whole, total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else. Your completeness must be understood by you and experienced in your thoughts as your own personal reality."

"A happy woman is one who has no cares at all; a cheerful woman is one who has cares but doesn't let them get her down."

"There is a growing strength in women but it's in the forehead, not the forearm. Men will always be attracted to women with nice soft arms and a fleshy bosom."

"Why should I go when it's going so good? … I lived through the garbage. I might as well dine on the caviar."

"So long as it doesn't get to the point where you don't remember whose opera you're listening to, I'm willing to experiment."

"I've always tried to go a step past wherever people expected me to end up. I'm not about to change now."

"My voice had a long, nonstop career. It deserves to be put to bed with quiet and dignity, not yanked out every once in a while to see if it can still do what it used to do. It can't."

"Art is the signature of civilizations."

"I really do believe I can accomplish a great deal with a big grin, I know some people find that disconcerting, but that doesn't matter."

"There are no shortcuts to any place worth going."

"You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try."