Susan Vreeland Quotes & Sayings

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership. — 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

Archival and published history does not always record personal relationships of historical figures, so characters must be invented to allow the subject to reveal their interior realm through intimate interaction. — 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

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

The gift art gives us is that instead of seeing only our own world, we see into other times, which offers a window into other cultures and sensibilities. — Susan Vreeland

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

As New York careens toward the modernity of the twentieth century when Gibson girls were transforming themselves into working women, Clara Driscoll enters the male field of stained glass artistry and builds a lively, multi-national, multi-class women's department within Tiffany Studios. — 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

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

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

Now he knew ... that there was nothing so vital as paying attention, and perfecting the humble offices of love. — Susan Vreeland

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

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

When I see Tiffany windows in churches across the United States, I get a sense of spiritual upliftment from that. — Susan 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

When I think how art education is eliminated whenever we get a budget crunch in the schools, I have to stand up and say that even when there was dire poverty ten blocks away from Tiffany Studios in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, there was art and creativity within. — Susan Vreeland

After one hundred days of confinement following a bone marrow transplant, I rejoiced in taking short walks to a nearby park as I was writing 'Girl in Hyacinth Blue.' The uncertainty of my survival made every blade of grass gorgeous in its green intensity, lifting itself up, doing its part to make the world beautiful. — Susan Vreeland

Overblown responsibility was a part of my preoccupation with myself. — Susan Vreeland

People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her. — Susan Vreeland

A woman can't stay hard when all around her is loveliness. — Susan Vreeland

To live and move and have her being in a flow of blue. — Susan Vreeland

God taking from us and loving us at the same time by providing comforters was a kind of spiritual equanimity. It seemed a phenomenon of life how a death insinuates us into the debt of those who stand by us in trouble and console us. — 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

Everybody works ... That's what life is. Work and a little play and a lot of prayer. — Susan Vreeland

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

I ventured into fiction in 1988 with 'What Love Sees,' a biographical novel of a woman's unwavering determination to lead a full life despite blindness. — Susan Vreeland

I'm hoping that I make readers into museum goers and museum goers into readers. — Susan Vreeland

I've come to think that if doing something simple or silly can give a person pleasure, then, by God, do it — Susan Vreeland

There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing. — Susan Vreeland

No one but another painter could know the delicacy required to balance the complexities, to keep reality at bay in order to remain in the innermost center of his work. — Susan Vreeland

I had always held the notion that if two people love the same thing, they must love each other as well, but now the memories of that love had been tarnished by betrayal. — Susan Vreeland

How easily a parent's motive could be misconstrued by an injured child. — Susan Vreeland

That a thing made by hand, the work and thought of a single craftsman, can endure much longer than its maker, through centuries in fact, can survive natural catastrophe, neglect, and even mistreatment, has always filled me with wonder. Sometimes in museums, looking at a humble piece of pottery from ancient Persia or Pompeii, or a finely wrought page from a medieval illuminated manuscript toiled over by a nameless monk, or a primitive tool with a carved handle, I am moved to tears. The unknown life of the maker is evanescent in its brevity, but the work of his or her hands and heart remains. — Susan Vreeland

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

Each time we enter imaginatively into the life of another, it's a small step upwards in the elevation of the human race. — Susan Vreeland

What the world calls failure, I call learning. — Susan Vreeland

No matter where life takes you,' she said, 'the place where you stand at any moment is holy ground. — 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

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

Page 357 - if the mountain was smooth, you couldn't climb it. — Susan Vreeland

Art history looks at art works and the people who have created them. — Susan Vreeland

Work is love made plain, whether man's work or woman's work. — 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

The Tiffany lamp is an American icon bridging the immigrants, settlement houses, and the slums of the Lower East Side and the wealthy industrialists of upper Manhattan, the Gilded Age and its excesses. — Susan Vreeland

How love builds itself unconsciously, he thought, out of the momentous ordinary. — Susan Vreeland

I remember being disappointed when Papa had shown me Caravaggio's Judith. She was completely passive while she was sawing through a man's neck. Caravaggio gave all the feeling to the man. Apparently, he couldn't imagine a woman to have a single thought. I wanted to paint her thoughts, if such a thing were possible
determination and concentration and belief in the absolute necessity of the act. The fate of her people resting on her shoulders ... — Susan Vreeland

For a century, everyone assumed that the iconic Tiffany lamps were conceived and designed by that American master of stained glass. Not so! It was a woman! — Susan Vreeland

I made my personal discovery of Emily Carr while visiting Victoria in 1981 to write a travel article. Immediately, her strong colors attracted me; her spunk fascinated me. Her down-to-earth voice in her writing appealed to me as authentic and original. — Susan Vreeland

I could say diamonds are a girl's best friend, and that never changes. But the taste for art did change. — Susan Vreeland

I don't know if a historian or scholar owns an opinion. — 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

Coming out of the Louvre for the first time in 1971, dizzy with new love, I stood on Pont Neuf and made a pledge to myself that the art of this newly discovered world in the Old World would be my life companion. — Susan Vreeland

Look long enough, out or in, and you'll be glad you are who you are. — Susan Vreeland

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

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

In the end, it's only the moments that we have. — Susan Vreeland

To feel the coolness of the blue glass, like solid pieces of the sea. — Susan Vreeland

Think hard before you begin, then enter the work. — Susan Vreeland

He and I had a bridge that no one else traveled that made us artistic lovers, passionate without a touch of the flesh. He made me thrive, and valuing that, I could do nothing that would endanger it. — 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

When I was nine, my great grandfather, a landscape painter, taught me to mix colors. With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared as if by magic on a page of textured watercolor paper. — Susan 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

Allowing beauty a place in the soul was a powerful antidote to the stress and strain of mortal life. — Susan 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

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

It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials
I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered
it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments. — Susan Vreeland

Reproducing nature slavishly is not art. — Susan Vreeland

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

Love is so easily bruised by the necessity of making choices. — Susan 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 company, Tiffany Studios, ended up in bankruptcy in 1930 - early '30s. — Susan Vreeland

It was only after I began to write fiction that I found a way to connect with painting. — Susan Vreeland

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

When I learned that near Roussillon there were ochre quarries and mines from which was extracted the ore which produced pigments in all the warm hues of the color wheel, I had a substantial artistic link to this region beyond mere love. — Susan Vreeland

Where there is no human connection, there is no compassion. Without compassion, then community, commitment, loving-kindness, human understanding, and peace all shrivel. Individuals become isolated, the isolated turn cruel, and the tragic hovers in the forms of domestic and civil violence. Art and literature are antidotes to that. — Susan Vreeland

I suppose it's easier for most writers to create and vivify characters of their own gender. — Susan Vreeland

Train yourselves by seeking and acknowledging beauty moment by moment every day of your lives," he told them. "Exercise your eyes. Take pleasure in the grace of shape and the excitement of color. — Susan 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

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

You think because I am her mother I can remake her? — Susan Vreeland

The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time. — Susan Vreeland

A hard choice. Water or books. Hmm. One could always have wine instead. — Susan Vreeland

To feel the grace of God in a painting of the dear, quiet commonness of a domestic interior, or in a landscape, seascape, cityscape, trains us to feel the grace of God in the thing itself in situ. — Susan Vreeland

He had a thought that amused him. "Figures, still life, landscape, AND an animal! Zola, eat your hat!" he bellowed. — Susan Vreeland