Canvas World Quotes & Sayings

It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain. — Virginia Woolf

On the surface, there was always an impeccably realistic world, but underneath, behind the backdrop's cracked canvas, lurked something different, something mysterious or abstract. — Milan Kundera

Some of us are fated to live in a box from which there is only temporary release. We of the damned-up spirits, of the thwarted feelings, of the blocked hearts, and the pent-up thoughts, we who long to blast out, flood forth in a torrent of rage or joy or even madness, but there is nowhere for us to go, nowhere in the world because no one will have us as we are, and there is nothing to do except to embrace the secret pleasures of our sublimations, the arc of a sentence, the kiss of a rhyme, the image that forms on paper or canvas, the inner cantata, the cloistered embroidery, the dark and dreaming needlepoint from hell or heaven or purgatory or none of those three, but there must be some sound and fury from us, some clashing cymbals in the void. — Siri Hustvedt

The world is rather shot to pieces (end of World War II), 1945), but the spectators climb out of their caves and pretend to have again become normal and customary humans who ask each other's pardon instead of eating one another or sucking each other's blood. The entertaining folly of war evaporates, distinguished boredom sits down again on the dignified old overstuffed chairs ... May I report about myself that I have had a truly grotesque time, brim-full with work, Nazi persecutions, bombs, hunger, and again and again work - in spite of everything (using his bed sheets as canvas — Max Beckmann

I started when I was 15 years old. And at that time, I was not thinking about changing the world, I was doing graffiti - writing my name everywhere, using the city as a canvas. I was going in the tunnels of Paris, on the rooftops with my friends. Each trip was an excursion, was an adventure. — JR

Whether it's a pebble in a riverbed or a soaring mountain peak, I see everything in the world as the handiwork of the Lord. When I paint, I try to represent the beauty of God's creation in my art. Many modern painters see the world as a jumble of random lines and shapes with no divine beauty or order, and their works reflect their viewpoint. Because I see God's peacefulness, serenity, and contentment, I work to capture those feelings on the canvas. My vision of God defines my vision of the world. — Thomas Kinkade

Reading takes you places; it is all up to your imagination. The world (or in this case book) is your canvas, go paint it. — BOB

One thing is sure - we have to transform the three-dimensional world of objects into the two-dimensional world of the canvas ... To transform three into two dimensions is for me an experience full of magic in which I glimpse for a moment that fourth dimension which my whole being is seeking. — Max Beckmann

Do you remember the church across the sands? You stood outside and planned to travel the lands, where the pilgrims go. So you packed your world up inside a canvas sack, set off down the highway with your rings and Kerouac. Someone said they saw you in Nepal a long time back. Tell me why you look away, don't you have a word to say? — Al Stewart

Wonder too ... if the rent in the canvas of our life backdrop, the losses that puncture our world, our own emptiness, might actually become places to see. — Ann Voskamp

The beauty of science fiction is its open canvas. You can hypothesize about any element of the world. It doesn't have to be laser battles and things exploding, you can be JG Ballad and maybe just change one little thing about the real world and that becomes science fiction. — Duncan Jones

The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great coloured surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry upon his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes' handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in love. — Mervyn Peake

In this world, this life, "flow" [the times when our work or play so absorbs and attunes our energies that we lose track of time] comes to an end. The canvas is dry, the fugue is complete, the band plays the tag one more time and then resolves on the final chord. And, too, the book is finished, the service is over, the lights go up in the darkened theater and we emerge blinking into the bright lights of the "real world." But what if the timeless, creative world we had glimpsed is really the real world -- and it is precisely its reality that gave it such power to captivate us for a while? What if our ultimate destiny is that moment of enjoyment and engagement we glimpse in the artist's studio? — Andy Crouch

I think something happens with age. And I find this really a lot in what I read from certain art critics: For people who are all about change-people who are supposed to be intellectually and culturally drawn to the idea of change and how the voice of a creative person affects the world on a bigger scale than just the canvas-I would expect a person in that position to have that open mind. It's only a sign of age that they become so locked in their own rules that they forget that this is what it's all about. — Marc Jacobs

The world is a glorious bounty. There is more food than can be eaten if we would limit our numbers to those who can be cherished, there are more beautiful girls than can be dreamed of, more children than we can love, more laughter than can be endured, more wisdom than can be absorbed. Canvas and pigments lie in wait, stone, wood, and metal are ready for sculpture, random noise is latent for symphonies, sites are gravid for cities, institutions lie in the wings ready to solve our most intractable problems, parables of moving power remain unformulated and yet, the world is finally unknowable. — Ian L. McHarg

But deepest of all illusory Appearances, for hiding Wonder, as for many other ends, are your two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances, SPACE and TIME. These, as spun and woven for us from before Birth itself, to clothe our celestial ME for dwelling here, and yet to blind it, lie all-embracing, as the universal canvas, or warp and woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this Phantasm Existence, weave and paint themselves. In vain, while here on Earth, shall you endeavor to strip them off; you can, at best, but rend them asunder for moments, and look through. — Thomas Carlyle

Writing a novel is a lot like directing a movie because you are creating a world and a tone, you are creating a large canvas and all the details. — Stephen Chbosky

As free and crazy as we want to be, and how much we want to make the world a canvas, there's also a part of us that doesn't want to make any mark. — Gerard Way

Those boots were almost all he owned in this world. They were his home. An anecdote: One time a recruit was watching him bone and wax those golden boots, and he held one up to the recruit and said, 'If you look in there deeply enough, you'll see Adam and Eve.'
Billy Pilgrim had not heard this anecdote. But, lying on the black ice there, Billy stared into the patina of the corporal's boots, saw Adam and Eve in the golden depths. They were naked. They were so innocent, so vulnerable, so eager to behave decently. Billy Pilgrim loved them.
Next to the golden boots were a pair of feet which were swaddled in rags. They were crisscrossed by canvas straps, were shod with hinged wooden clogs. Billy looked up at the face that went with the clogs. It was the face of a blond angel of fifteen-year-old boy.
The boy was as beautiful as Eve.
Billy was helped to his feet by the lovely boy, by the heavenly androgyne. — Kurt Vonnegut

The narrative image has more dimensions than the painted image - literature is more complex than painting. Initially, this complexity represents a disadvantage, because the reader has to concentrate much more than when they're looking at a canvas. It gives the author, on the other hand, the opportunity to feel like a creator: they can offer their readers a world in which there's room for everyone, as every reader has their own reading and vision. — Dumitru Tepeneag

The blank page is my canvas, give me enough and I'll change the world. — Unknown

All of my works are steps on my journey, a struggle for truth that I have waged with pen, canvas, and materials. Overhead is a distant, radiant star, and the more I stretch to reach it, the further it recedes. But by the power of my spirit and my single-hearted pursuit of the path, I have clawed my way through the labyrinthine confusion of the world of people in an unstinting effort to approach even one step closer to the realm of the soul. — Yayoi Kusama

I am a pop artist, so my medium is public opinion and the world is my canvas — Kanye West

With a stroke of love on the canvas of my soul I'm painting a perfect world with shades of Michelangelo With each promise made in every heart that knows we can live in a perfect world in shades of Michelangelo I hear songs of children echo in the sky I hear songs of children a tomorrow so bright! — Belinda Carlisle

I recount as this journey begins where I rest to gather the tale from this
same old house resting on the hill, leaving me a view of a carnival once seen from just across the tracks. My pallet is dry now. The colors I see no more. The rain has washed away many of the signs that once stood for a prosper
home and family. My grave is waiting. The dreams once filled my head with
images of world unison, hope and companionship for all. The saga spoken
through my canvas drew darker as the years went on to the bitter cold nights.
All that comes to me now are glimpses of faces that graced my soul. — Kris Courtney

'Fury' whetted my appetite for a bigger canvas and this idea of world creation. You can do amazing things as a filmmaker if you have the proper tools, and those are time and money. — David Ayer

I understand how people come to such conclusions. They see the church painting ugliness, arrogance, and lust on the canvas of this world, and so they walk or run away. There's only one way to address this: We need to be painting different pictures - of justice, mercy, love, hospitality, celebration, and hope. — Richard Dahlstrom

I tried different techniques during my career, but I especially fell in love with painting with oil and pallette-knife. Every artwork is the result of long painting process; every canvas is born during the creative search; every painting is full of my inner world. — Leonid Afremov

He liked seeing the world through her eyes. The night, to him, was rather ordinary, overlaid with London's crowded odors and a damp that promised a deeply unlovely fog in the near future. But she preferred to consider the commonest patch of grass and the most unremarkable clump of trees worthy of a Constable canvas - in which case this night could very well have graced the ceiling of a great cathedral. — Sherry Thomas

Love is when unknowingly I am moving to a world of no return, Where my desire and your fragrance together burn
all your thoughts in canvas of my mind and soul
turns in to a masterpiece as my life's aim and goal
looks I am taken over and over away by you
showering in me as a rain of you and only you — Seema Gupta

When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on. — Wayne Thiebaud

The physical world exists, but that's only the paint and canvas; that's only the instrument we use to make music; that's only the stage where the play is performed. — Dennis Vickers

How can we accept a situation in which there are no longer orchestras, choruses, libraries or art classes to nourish our children? We need more support for the arts, not less
particularly to make this rich world available to young people whose vision is choked by a stark reality. How many children, who have no other outlet in their lives for their grief, have found solace in an instrument to play or a canvas to paint on? When you take into consideration the development of the human heart, soul and imagination, don't the arts take on just as much importance as math or science? — Barbra Streisand

This world is but a canvas for our imagination. — Henry David Thoreau

He began by talking about the Christ child as the representative of all children and what it was to be childlike. He was arguing in favour of the need for times of weakness and vulnerability in our lives. An always invincible, strong, resistant humanity would have no room for growth or learning. It would have nothing to do. There would be no test because there could be no failure. Humanity needed its failings in order to understand itself. This was more than a matter of learning from mistakes. It was about acknowledging weakness, denying pride, and beginning any task from a position of openness, aware of the possibility that we often fall short. We must learn from the appearance of the Christ child in the world, as ready for companionship as tribulation, a blank canvas on whose surface life was painted and where depths contained mysteries yet to be understood. 'The — James Runcie

I don't know anything about art so I can't tell you that it's watercolor or acrylic or that it's on canvas or anything art related at all. I can tell you that it's a painting of a hand, my hand, turned up and opened to the world and that it reaches into my body and rips out everything that's left. Because in the palm, right in the center, is the pearl button I never reached. — Katja Millay

Anarchy wears two faces, both creator and destroyer. Thus destroyers topple empires; make a canvas of clean rubble where creators then can build another world. Rubble, once achieved, makes further ruins' means irrelevant.
Away with our explosives, then!
Away with our destroyers! They have no place within our better world.
But let us raise a toast to all our bombers, all our bastards, most unlovely and most unforgivable.
Let's drink their health ... then meet with them no more. — Alan Moore

Yahoo! has clearly established itself as the go-to destination for big events and breaking news, and we are focused on providing the best digital canvas for the world's greatest storytellers to create, develop and showcase their visions. — Ross Levinsohn

With memories of gravestones, of combing fingers through tangled hair, I wonder too ... If the rent in the canvas of our life backdrop, the losses that puncture our world, and our own emptiness, might actually become places to see.
To see through to God.
That which tears open our souls, those holes which splatter sight, they actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart aching beauty beyond. To him. To the god whom we endlessly crave.
But how? How do we choose to allow the holes to become seeing through to collect places? How do I give up resentment for gratitude, anger for spilling joy, so focus for God communion. To fully live to fully live grace enjoy with all that is beauty internal it is possible — Ann Voskamp

Concrete is the omnipresent human signature, our principal artistic medium on the world's blank canvas: Wherever we went, the Earth slowly disappeared beneath it. — Rick Yancey

They do not know that the dream is a constant in life. They do not know that the dream is wine, it's fizz, it's yeast. It's an eager and vivacious small animal with a pointy nose that pries through everything in a perpetual motion. They do not know that the dream is canvas and color and brush. They do not know nor even dream that dream commands life. When a man or a woman dreams, the world leaps and moves forward like a colorful ball in the hands of a child. — Antonio Gedeao

But it wasn't their separation that was consuming my mind just then; it was Evelyn's garden. Bee had taken us there when we were children, and it was all rushing back: a magical world of hydrangeas, roses, and dahlias, and lemon shortbread cookies on Evelyn's patio. It seemed like only yesterday that my sister and I sat on the little bench under the trellis while Bee hovered over her easel, capturing on her canvas whatever flower was in bloom in the lush beds. "Your garden," I said, "I remember your garden."
"Yes," Evelyn said, smiling.
I nodded, a little astonished that this memory, buried so deep in my mind, had risen to the surface just then like a lost file from my subconscious. It was as if the island had unlocked it somehow. — Sarah Jio

Give me a blank canvas, and I will give you the world. — Shauna Scheets

History is a great painter, with the world for canvas, and life for a figure. It exhibits man in his pride, and nature in her magnificence,
Jerusalem bleeding under the Roman, or Lisbon vanishing in flame and earthquake. History must be splendid. Bacon called it the pomp of business. Its march is in high places, and along the pinnacles and points of great affairs. — Robert Aris Willmott

I was a blank canvas, no thoughts, no emotions, no needs or desires, just a square of white floating through a loud, chaotic world, and life would paint me with color and substance, smear and spread and colorize me. — Jasinda Wilder

Jeb is an anchor; he holds me grounded to my humanity and compassion. But Morpheus is the wind; he drags me kicking and screaming to the highest precipice, shoves me off, then watches me fly with netherling wings. When Jeb's at my side, the world is a canvas
unblemished and welcoming; when I'm with Morpheus, it's a wanton playground
wicked and addictive. — A.G. Howard

You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study ... Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas. — Steven Pressfield

The world is your canvas and your teacher.Take a day to reflect, measure and adjust on your goals; progress is essential to continued success. — Bob Proctor

When Jesus was wrapping up his days on earth, he didn't tell us to go to church. He didn't tell us to engage in a spiritualized version of channel surfing, as we hop from place to place in search of just the right programming to entertain us. He told us to get out and actually do the stuff he'd already been doing, painting the hope of God's reign on the canvas of God's world. He told us we're artists. — Richard Dahlstrom

Coral, my love, you are too pure, too innocent, too alive for me,"
he said slowly, almost carefully. "My world is like a drawing in black
and white on a gray canvas, without a single note of color to bring it
to life. And now, on this pale and melancholic picture, a red flower
has fallen, a warm and scented flower." He sighed. "It's a wonderful
contrast, but too vivid ... — Hannah Fielding

This world is but canvas to our imaginations. — Henry David Thoreau

I am also an artist. I have the whole world as my canvas. I paint souls ... — Meher Baba

The individual representation of the object, treated sympathetically or antipathetically, is highly necessary and is an enrichment to the world in form. The elimination of the human relationship causes the vacuum which makes all of us suffer in various degrees - an individual alteration of the details of the object represented is necessary in order to display on the canvas the whole physicals reality. — Max Beckmann

And when this grand canvas, our life, is finished, may the world in some small or large way be a better place. — Robert Regis Dvorak

Kissed me like he had all the time in the world. Slowly at first, just a brushing of his mouth against mine, and then deeper, parting my lips with his tongue. It wasn't just a kiss. Not when his tongue danced over mine or the way he tasted me. Reece turned kissing into an art form, and if I had to attach a color to it, to get it on canvas, it would be supple shades of reds and purples. — J. Lynn

It's not just a boring exercise in pushing oil paint around a canvas. It's a way of opening a threshold to an exciting new world of vision. — Nelson Shanks

What could be more entrancing than a carefree nomadic existence camping, moving, exploring strange places and the ruins of forgotten empires, sleeping under canvas or the open sky, and giving no thought to the conventions and restriction of the modern world? — M.M. Kaye

The creative personality is always one that looks on the world as fit for change and on himself as an instrument for change. Otherwise, what are you creating for? If the world is perfectly all right the way it is, you have no place in it. The creative personality thinks of the world as a canvas for change and of himself as a divine agent of change. — Jacob Bronowski

There was all the difference in the world between this planning airily away from the canvas and actually taking her brush and making the first mark. — Virginia Woolf

I have patches of insomnia, and I'm fascinated by the otherness of the world at night. The stillness. Daytime preoccupations fall away, standards change, thoughts change. It's a canvas for reinvention, I think. — Morag Joss

'Hellraiser' is an amazing world that Clive Barker created, and it is such a beautifully vibrant and surreal world within which to work. It is also not an undaunting canvas. It is a canvas created by an artist. — Patrick Lussier

For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms "success" and "failure" had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one's place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things. — Paul Auster

White Sky. Trees fading at the skyline, the mountains gone. My hands dangled from the cuffs of my jacket as if they weren't my own. I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew -the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas was filled in-an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them. — Donna Tartt

Today she feels she is the master of her craft. Today she is free of the grinding tyranny of doubt. The voice that mocks her ambition. The voice that bites and slanders and causes her more heartache than any other voice. Today she is focused, she is exultant. Her every brushstroke like a wake of radiance. Today she can move the paint around the canvas at will. If only painting were like this every day. Without the sudden extinguishing of light, the collapsing of belief, the cursing and flailing, the knots and clenched fists in a world gone suddenly dark. — Glenn Haybittle

There is some other form that you contain within yourself that is not will or purpose and, when applied to art, serves you best. If you systematically apply to the art that you create the aggression of the world that turned you towards art in the first place; if you, in turn, become the aggressor towards your canvas, the thing that you're doing; if you, in turn, work your will upon this thing that you want - you will then cause a dissatisfaction in this life that you create. — Milton Resnick

This is your world
You're the creator
Find freedom on this canvas
Believe, that you can do it,
'Cuz you can do it.
You can do it. — Bob Ross

My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected color areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world. — Roy Lichtenstein

The thing for me is, what if one returns to these maxims, these rather simplistic maxims "Be the change you want to see in the world." Because what canvas have we but the self for these kind of explorations, ultimately. — Russell Brand

It is for that moment when I might steady you so you don't fall, I have added my blood to an inkwell. Indelible now will be my mark on history's canvas and upon any sincere debate of God where reason finally prevails. And when you have the strength, you too may find another to hold up. They lean against each other in a storm, those cypresses grown tall together ... through the years. If they had not trusted and protected one another the way they do, they would not have survived and given us their grace and shade - a place for our eyes to meet. Our friendship can be like this: a needed lift, a sail, a pillar, a springboard to taste the unfathomable. It is to tend you as you come into being, like a new world, that causes me to stay, gives me a purpose. Of course I thank you for that ... for letting me help. — Rumi

Magick is an art; using reality and the world as its canvas. — Dacha Avelin

But Hannah's friend didn't understand the volatile balancing act between art and sanity, that the act of creation was like walking a tightrope during an earthquake. She didn't understand Hannah's stupid need for validation, or that the size of the audience increased the stakes and multiplied the fear. She didn't understand that creativity was dangerous, that, yes, there were some people who could stand before a canvas, paint a sunset that would bring the world to its knees, and return to their loved ones as a complete person who didn't hurt, didn't cry, didn't spill blood to appease the host of fickle muses. But Hannah did. Hannah's best ideas - sometimes her only ideas - were buried beneath the skin. — Jake Vander Ark

Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus. — Stephen Shore

But when I accept the call of creative passion, I am a bold stroke of vermilion, a renegade hyperbole, or the wild fury of jazz violin. The world is a canvas to explore, a blank page to fill, and an arpeggio of waiting experiences. This moving masterpiece called "life" becomes intoxicating when it's lived as if it were art. — Jill Badonsky

Light - dews - breezes - bloom - and freshness; not one of which ... has yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in the world. — John Constable

It is human nature to take the most magical of worlds for granted, turning each one into a blank canvas upon which to paint the lives of those who would live there. Only an outsider can see a world's wonders for what they truly are. — Neal Shusterman

A painting is nothing more than light reflected from the surface of a pigment-covered canvas. But a great painter can make you see the depth, make you feel the underlying emotion, make you sense the larger world. That, too, is the power of science: to sense and convey the depth and dimensionality of nature, to glance at the surface and to divine the shape of the universe around us. — Carl Safina

You take a painting, you have a white, virginal piece of canvas that is the world of purity, and then you put your imagery on it, and you try to bring it back to the original purity. — Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

I think in many ways, I'm sort of a blank canvas, because in many ways, I'm just observing the world and the people around me and their characters and letting them kind of explode off me and to find out why they're doing what they're doing. But then every once in awhile, I get to take on a whole new character. — Danny Pudi

And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way," Leibniz said. "Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle
all in the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe
for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient. — Neal Stephenson

I picked up the blue tube again, unscrewed the cap, and squeezed a perfect line of paint onto the palate. As soon as I brushed it on the canvas, I was responsible for it, for the inevitable imperfections. My world had always been like that paint, left on a palate. That color was a passive observer. But not it wanted to make something of itself. And I was terrified. — Kate Scelsa

My hands are flowing like sunlight. The shapes and colors are astounding. I don't understand these images that are empowering me. My brush touches the canvas like photons to the earth, and a new world develops, free from my control, yet intrinsically dependent upon me. I am sweating with elation. I have no idea what I am doing, or what it is my hands are trying to see. There is so much strength in this clarity I am overpowered by the independence of it. — Daniel J. Rice

I do not possess the ability to draw or paint.
I can't sing or dance.
I can't knit or sew.
But I am an artist.
I have the ability to put onto paper, words that tell an intriguing story.
I am a writer.
A writer is someone who, with just words, can paint a beautiful picture.
A writer can open up a world of imagination you didn't realize was possible.
When you open up a book and become so consumed in the story, you feel like you're a part of it ... you're standing next to that character and feeling the same way that character feels,
That's the art of a writer.
I am an artist.
My inspiration is the world around me.
My paintbrush is my words.
My easel is my computer.
My canvas is the mind of my reader. — Bri Justine

Our tragedy is their beauty. Our pain is their art. The beatific bereavement that is our life captured on a canvas for all the world to see. — Solange Nicole

He looked at a picture on the wall and saw everything that existed outside the room he was sitting in and the one he was trying to write about. It was a picture of fishing nets stowed in canvas baskets and it had sex, memories, cravings, names of old friends, principal rivers of the world. Writing was bad for the soul when you got right down to it. It protected your worst tendencies. Narrowed everything to failure and its devastations. Gave your cunning an edge of treachery and your jellyfish heart a reason to fall deeper into silence. — Don DeLillo

The minute I sat in front of a canvas I was happy. Because it was a world, and I could do what I liked in it. — Alice Neel

Romance was different in her world. In our world. She believed it lived all around us. In the trees, the blue sky hiding behind rain clouds, snow flakes clinging to windshields, squirrels hiding their food, blades of grass catching drops from a misty morning, and in every person to walk the earth. Ella loved to sit on city benches and make up stories about passing strangers. Since meeting her my entire world changed. I always turned life into strands of color on an empty canvas. People blurred by like flashes of light. Just blurs. Then Ella walked into my life and everything slowed down. The blurs of color became people with stories. People with hearts. People. Like me. — Marilyn Grey

Heaven speed the canvas, gallantly unfurl'd, To furnish and accommodate a world, To give the Pole the produce of the sun, And knit the unsocial climates into one. — William Cowper

world was dripping down his eyeballs like wet oil paint down a canvas. — Eoin Colfer

The world is but a canvas to our imagination — Henry David Thoreau