His Canvas Quotes & Sayings

I'm not gonna box Ruiz ... I don't box, I knock holes through people. I'm gonna cut Ruiz up. I'm gonna butcher him. He ain't gonna last five rounds. Either he winds up on the canvas or in the hospital. It's his choice. — James Toney

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 wanted to absorb every moment of this night. I knew it was special. I wanted to keep it locked away inside me forever just the way it was. When I closed my eyes to sleep, I thought of how he'd glowed like a jewel in the light of the campfire. The way the flames carved him against the darkness. The very shape of his head. The smudges of chocolate and marshmallows on his fingers and lips. How the hair on his legs looked like filaments of gold. When I was certain my heart hat painted the canvas in my memory...I fell asleep. — Dan Skinner

When the light faded, Vince strolled down to the falls. Heavy mist made the spotlights appear especially cool. He got himself a sausage on a bun, with lots of mustard and fried onions, and settled on a patch of damp grass to watch the standard Friday night fireworks. He never tires of the fascinating colours and patterns. They're impossible to reproduce on canvas. He couldn't resist making his usual wishes on them.

He wished he had someone special with him.

Maybe there's some girl on the planet who would like to hear that gold fireworks contain actual gold, he thought while watching a nearby couple laugh. Wouldn't it be great to be able to share that? — Jess Molly Brown

Pops gave him a cool stare that settled Tom down - a thing not always easy to do. "Son, do you know what history is?"
"Uh ... stuff that happened in the past?"
"Nope," he said, trying on his canvas change-belt. "History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever growing pile of crap. Right now, we're standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we'll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come. That's why your folks' clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example. And, as someone who's destined to buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a leetle more forgiving. — Stephen King

Okay, you need to eat something. Before we do anything else, you have to eat."
"I just did."
I gave him a hard look, but his face was entirely innocent. He was fucking with me, right? He had to be. "Man cannot live by pussy alone," I said. — Ava Lore

Is it an inspiring sight to see a man commit a heroic gesture, and then learn that he goes to vaudeville shows for relaxation? Or see a man who's painted a magnificent canvas - and learn that he spends his time sleeping with every slut he meets?"
"What do you want? Perfection?"
" - or nothing. So, you see, I take the nothing. — Ayn Rand

Its great thorns pierced the canvas, and its heavy fragrance rushed within, enveloping his sleep, becoming one with his breath, and penetrated the chambers of his exploding heart. — Patti Smith

Man offers himself to God. He stands before Him like the canvas before the painter or the marble before the sculptor. At the same time he asks for His grace, expresses his needs and those of his brothers in suffering. Such a type of prayer demands complete renovation. The modest, the ignorant, and the poor are more capable of this self-denial than the rich and the intellectual. — Alexis Carrel

If I do anything, I have to start over, but all I have is fragments of ideas. Just pieces. Like a germ of an idea for this, and a germ of an idea for that. Nothing whole or concrete" - Violet

" 'Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.' Pearl S. Buck. Maybe a germ is enough. Maybe it's all you need. We can start small. Open up a new document or pull out a black piece of paper. We'll make it our canvas. Remember what Michelangelo said about the sculpture being in the stone - it was there from the beginning, and his job was to bring it out. Your words are in there too" -Finch — Jennifer Niven

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

Click.
The salamander flared, etching the room with searing white light and dark shadows.
Otto screamed. He fell to the floor, clutching at his throat. He sprang to his feet, goggle-eyed and gasping, and staggered, knock-kneed and wobbly-legged, the length of the room and back again. He sank down behind a desk , scattering paperwork with a wildly flailing hand.
"Aarghaarghaaaargh ... "
There was a shocked silence.
Otto stood up, adjusted his cravat, and dusted himself off. Only then did he look up at the row of shocked faces.
"Vel?" he said sternly. "Vat are you all looking at? It is just a normal reaction, zat is all. I am vorking on it. Light in all its forms is mine passion. Light is my canvas, shadows are my brush."
But strong light hurts you!" said Sacharissa. "It hurts vampires!"
"Yes. It iss a bit of a bugger, but zere you go. — Terry Pratchett

We must offer ourselves to God like a clean, smooth canvas and not worry ourselves about what God may choose to paint on it, but at each moment, feel only the stroke of His brush. — Jean-Pierre De Caussade

I am not concerned with simply surviving. I am very concerned about improving. I start each day by examining yesterday's work and looking for areas where I can improve. I am always trying to draw the characters better, and trying to design each panel somewhat in the manner a painter would treat his canvas. — Charles M. Schulz

Stop complainin." Jess climbed up to the cab and leaned down to pull me up beside him. "I'm not complaining." His fingers clung to my wrists as the soles on my gray, canvas shoes slipped up the worn steps. "It's hot. I'm sweatin'. I don't want to go campin'," his voiced pitched high to mock me. — S.D. Hendrickson

Then eventually Westwood arrived. He looked nothing like Reacher expected, but the reality fit the bill just as well as the preconceptions had. He was an outdoors type, not a lab rat, and sturdy rather than pencil-necked. He looked like a naturalist or an explorer. He had short but unruly hair, fair going gray, and a beard of the same length and color. He was red in the face from sunburn and had squint lines around his eyes. He was forty-five, maybe. He was wearing clothing put together from high-tech fabrics and many zippers, but it was all old and creased. He had hiking boots on his feet, with speckled laces like miniature mountain-climbing ropes. He was toting a canvas bag about as big as a mail carrier's. — Lee Child

I snapped the crossbow into the top of the mount, took a canvas bundle from the cart, and unrolled it. Crossbow bolts, tipped with the Galahad warheads.
"This is my baby." I petted the stock.
"You have a strange relationship with your weapons," Roman said.
"You have no idea," Raphael told him.
"This from a man with a living staff and a man who once drove four hours both ways for a sword he then put on his wall," I murmured.
"It was an Angus Trim," Raphael said.
"It's a sharpened strip of metal."
"You have an Angus Trim sword?" Kate's eyes lit up.
"Bought it at an estate auction," Raphael said. "If we get out of this alive, you are invited to come to my house and play with it."
It was good that Curran wasn't here and I was secure in our relationship, because that totally could be taken the wrong way. — Ilona Andrews

Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on stone, sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music, but clearest and most permanent, in words. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I got butterflies when Reno turned to face me. He had a compelling appearance - handsome, but in a rough and dangerous "don't fuck with me" kind of way. Maybe it was the canvas of muscle that pressed against his tight-fitted shirt, or the sharp cut of his jaw, or the concealed weapon beneath his shirt. But it was definitely the stony expression on his face. His musky cologne filled my nose, and I waited impatiently for him to speak.
Dark, Dannika (2014-07-27). Five Weeks (Seven Series #3) (p. 64). Kindle Edition. — Dannika Dark

It is not enough for a painter to be a clever craftsman; he must love to 'caress' his canvas, too. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

He liked too the specific and unexpected companionability of the place. There were times on the weekends when everyone was there at the same time, and at moments, he would emerge from the fog of his painting and sense that all of them were breathing in rhythm, panting almost, from the effort of concentrating. He could feel, then, the collective energy they were expending filling the air like gas, flammable and sweet, and would wish he could bottle it so that he might be able to draw from it when he was feeling uninspired, for the days in which he would sit in front of the canvas for literally hours, as though if he stared long enough, it might explode into something brilliant and charged. — Hanya Yanagihara

There are always a few bored audience members at an opera, especially by the time act four comes along. Those particular eyes would be wandering around the hall, searching for something, anything, interesting to watch. Those eyes would land on the little demon downstage right, unless they were distracted.
Right on cue, a large stage lamp broke free of its clamp in the rigging and swung on its cable into the back canvas. [ ... ]
On his way though the lobby minutes later, Artemis was highly amuse to overhear several audience members gushing over the unorthodox direction of the opera's final scene. The exploding lamp, muse one buff, was doubtless a metaphor for Norma's own falling star. But no, argued a second. The lamp was obviously a modernistic interpretation of the burning stake that Norma was about to face.
Or perhaps, thought Artemis as he pushed through the crowd to find a light Sicilian mist falling on his forehead, the exploding lamp was simply an exploding lamp. — Eoin Colfer

He made his colours, built his stretchers, plastered his canvas, painted his pictures, carpentered his frames, and painted them. 'Too bad I can't buy my own pictures,' he murmured aloud. 'Then I'd be completely self-sufficient.' — Irving Stone

The feelings and the memories and the perceptions in me are my own, they are terrible and secret and if I can turn them out, if I can display them on canvas ... or even on my skin if I must ... " He turned his head and looked at her. "Then they are special. Do you see? I create from my secrets, from the halls in my soul. — Kendra L. Saunders

An artist who wants to transpose a composition onto a larger canvas must conceive it over again in order to preserve its expression; he must alter its character and not just fill in the squares into which he has divided his canvas. — Henri Matisse

I was wondering if you would like to come over and assist me in going over those photographs." Malcolm said without any preamble. His voice was distracted and distant, and it rankled me.
"I don't know," I told him. "Are you going to stick your tongue in my twat and then run away again? — Ava Lore

She pinned him to the bulkhead with a kiss that was pure alchemy, and his hands found their way down her tunic, down to her breeches, where he unhitched her weapons belt with as much gratuitous fondling of the areas not covered by it as he could manage.
She took the belt from his hands and flung it against one of the stiffened canvas walls, where it struck with a clattering racket and slid to the floor. "If there is no way, make a way, Jean Tannen. Losers don't fuck in this particular cabin."
He picked her up, making a seat for her from his crossed arms, and whirled her around so that her back was against the bulkhead and her feet were dangling. He kissed her breasts through her tunic, grinning at her reaction. He stopped to put his head against her chest; felt the rapid flutter of her heart against his left cheek. — Scott Lynch

I hope and dream the time will come when serious artists will make marvelous pictures that will love and live in life-like manner and be far more interesting and wonderful than pictures you now see on canvas. I think if Michelangelo was alive today he would immediately see the wonders ... The artist can make his scenes and characters live instead of stand still on canvas in art museums. — Winsor McCay

Moses?" I said softly.
"Yeah?" His eyes lifted from the canvas briefly.
"There's a new law in Georgia."
"Does it directly contradict one of the laws of Moses?"
"Yes. Yes it does," I confessed.
"Hmm. Let's hear it." He set his brush down, wiped his hands on a cloth and approached the bed where I was positioned, draped in a sheet like a Rubenesque Madonna. I learned the term from him, and he seemed to think it was a good thing.
"Thou shall not paint," I commanded sternly. He leaned over me, one knee on the bed, his strong arms bracketing my head, and I turned slightly, looking up at him.
"Ever?" He smiled. I watched his head descend and his lips brushed mine. But his golden-green eyes stayed open, watching me as he kissed me. My toes curled and my eyes fluttered, the sensation of lips tasting lips pulling me under.
"No. Not ever, just sometimes," I sighed.
"Just when I'm in Georgia? — Amy Harmon

Only a man with a damaged canvas of his own can truly be a great restorer. — Daniel Silva

Casy gathered in his canvas sneakers and shoved his bare feet into them. "I ain't got your confidence," he said. "I'm always scared there's wire or glass under the dust. I don't know nothin' I hate so much as a cut toe. — John Steinbeck

Never on painter's canvas lives
The charm of his fancy's dream. — L.M. Montgomery

To achieve works of meaning, a writer (or any artist) must cut into himself and leave his soul on the canvas, exposed for anyone to do with what they please. Reject it. Spit on it. Swallow it whole. Whatever. It is done. — Mardra Sikora

Praise a fool, and slay him; for the canvas of his vanity is spread; His bark is shallow in the water, and a sudden gust shall sink it: Praise a wise man, and speed him on his way; for he carrieth the ballast of humility, And is glad when his course is cheered by the sympathy of brethren ashore. — Martin Farquhar Tupper

She grinned then traced her hands over his back. "I'm going to finish your ink, make you shine, then love you until the day I die."

He smiled back and she fell just that much more in love. "I'll be your everything. Your strength, your canvas, just yours."

Forever. — Carrie Ann Ryan

Bill Evans is a real serious jazz pianist who, in my book, crossed over boundaries in terms of color. He used the piano as his canvas. — Roberta Flack

Between nine and ten, at last, in the high clear picture--he was moving in these days, as in a gallery, from clever canvas to clever canvas--he drew a long breath: it was so presented to him from the first that the spell of his luxury wouldn't be broken. — Henry James

It is for the artist ... in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features. — James Whistler

Sunrises and sunsets were breathtaking moments in his life. Moments of exhilaration and ecstasy. Deeply moving moments when he would dream. Dreams that splashed myriad colors on his mind's gray canvas! — Avijeet Das

He stumbled past, revealing the canvas of his back. My sword ripped across it in so many rapid successions, I nearly wrote my name.
Zorro could kiss my ass. — Holly Jennings

The true poem is not that which the public read. There is always a poem not printed on paper, ... in the poet's life. It is what hehas become through his work. Not how is the idea expressed in stone, or on canvas or paper, is the question, but how far it has obtained form and expression in the life of the artist. His true work will not stand in any prince's gallery. — Henry David Thoreau

My God, are you even real?" she whispered. Holding her gaze, a sad smile lifted his mouth. "I think I am." "You make me feel like I'm in a dream," Emily confessed, wrapping her arms around his neck. "Like I'm sleepwalking and I don't even know it." ... "I'm able to close my eyes and just ... trust you. You're the color on my blank canvas, the light in my dark, the air in my lungs, and I almost let you go. I almost erased us from ever happening. I can't imagine not having you here with me. Please tell me you know how much I love you, Gavin. I need to hear it right now. Please. — Gail McHugh

The painter paints his brushes blackThrough the canvas runs a crackPortrait of the pain never answers back. — Phil Ochs

Once an artist painted on a huge canvas - the skies;
The sun, the landscapes and everything that was nice.
To complete the masterpiece into the frame He came-
And that is how, You, I and all life on earth became.
The same God that performed this miraculous feat,
One can reach by closing eyes and feeling his heart beat. — Sushrut A. Badhe

There are certain things - How to say this? OK. Let me give you an example. Can I give you an example? There's a self-portrait by Rembrandt. It's at Kenwood House, very close to where we live. It's one of my favorite paintings. I go to see it quite a lot. I start off on a walk on the Heath, and then I find myself there. It's one of the last self-portraits he did. He painted it sometime between 1665 and when he died four years later, bankrupt and alone. Whole stretches of the canvas are bare. There's a hurried intensity in the strokes - you can see where he scratched into the wet paint with the end of the brush. It's as if he knew there wasn't much time left. And yet, there's a serenity in his face, a sense of something that's survived its own ruin.
Fran couldn't give two shits about that painting. — Nicole Krauss

Christians belive in a sovereign God who never says "Oops". We believe that all our days ... are divine strokes on the canvas of our lives by the Master Artist who certified his skill, his power, and his love in the Masterpiece of Calvary. If you doubt His skill in painting your life - look at the Calvary — John Piper

The principle of painting is also to make a choice. "Even genius," writes Delacroix, ruminating on his art,
"is only the gift of generalizing and choosing." The painter isolates his subject, which is the first way of
unifying it. Landscapes flee, vanish from the memory, or destroy one another. That is why the landscape
painter or the painter of still life isolates in space and time things that normally change with the light, get
lost in an infinite perspective, or disappear under the impact of other values. The first thing that a
landscape painter does is to square off his canvas. He eliminates as much as he includes. — Albert Camus

He ached for creation. For life to somehow rise from the drawings in his sketching book. For his own energy, his own impressions to swirl and spin on a canvas. For a dream city he had tacked above his bed. — C.S. Richardson

Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting - that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is at the origin of art - and he had filled the hole, answered the question, splashed colour on the canvas, all done for himself, because he had to. Then complete strangers told him that his book had filled a hole in them, had answered a question, had brought colour to their lives. The comfort of strangers, be it a smile, a pat on the shoulder or a word of praise, is truly a comfort. — Yann Martel

Kraut was a stand-up guy in the old tradition, in a strange way reminiscent of my father in his steadfast refusal to abandon a position once he had taken it. It was a quality I lacked, and so admired in others when they weren't using it to beat me to the canvas or break my heart. — Miles Watson

She was convinced the demonic pain she had suffered in her leg as a child had been in some sort of preparation for the accident. Engraved in her memory was how she had been left speechless by the first attack. She had yet to accept that pain cannot be expressed in words but only in inarticulate screams. It took time before she could put brush to canvas, and still more time before she could paint pictures that screamed. In place of the screams themselves. In place of verbal descriptions. She owed it to her father, she thought, to the frantic look in his eyes which she would never forget, and to his words: 'Tell me, tell me! — Slavenka Drakulic

The man was of fine figure, swarthy, and stern in aspect; and he showed in profile a facial angle so slightly inclined as to be almost perpendicular. He wore a short jacket of brown corduroy, newer than the remainder of his suit, which was a fustian waistcoat with white horn buttons, breeches of the same, tanned leggings, and a straw hat overlaid with black glazed canvas. At his back he carried by a looped strap a rush basket, from which protruded at one end the crutch of a hay-knife, a wimble for hay-bonds being also visible in the aperture. His measured, springless walk was the walk of the skilled countryman as distinct from the desultory shamble of the general labourer; while in the turn and plant of each foot there was, further, a dogged and cynical indifference personal to himself, showing its presence even in the regularly interchanging fustian folds, now in the left leg, now in the right, as he paced along. — Thomas Hardy

After dinner, at five o'clock, the crew distributed folding canvas cots to the passengers, and each person opened his bed wherever he could find room, arranged it with the bedclothes from his petate, and set the mosquito netting over that. Those with hammocks hung them in the salon, and those who had nothing slept on the tablecloths that were not changed more than twice during the trip. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It would distort markets. Besides, if I bought a load of gold when I thought the price was going up, then it would drive up the price at that point. When I came to sell in the future it would depress the price. Thus, I wouldn't make the killing I thought I would, would I?"
"Yeah, but futures contracts."
"Same thing, dear boy."
"Art, then."
"If I bought Constable's Hay Wain direct from the artist it wouldn't have the same cachet as it does today. The absence of that piece from the market might mean that all of his work was devalued."
"Yeah, but you could bring another piece back."
"Ah, then the paint and canvas wouldn't age correctly. For older objets d'art, the carbon dating would show it was younger than it should be. Sorry, Kevin. You're not going to get rich by temporal smuggling or speculation. — Mark Speed

Later in the afternoon the sun went down with a riotous swirl of gold and varying blues and scarlets, and left the dry, rustling night of Western summer. Dexter watched from the veranda of the Golf Club, watched the even overlap of the waters in the little wind, silver molasses under the harvest-moon. Then the moon held a finger to her lips and the lake became a clear pool, pale and quiet. Dexter put on his bathing-suit and swam out to the farthest raft, where he stretched dripping on the wet canvas of the springboard. There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the lake were gleaming. Over on a dark peninsula a piano was playing the songs of last summer and of summers before that - songs from "Chin-Chin" and "The Count of Luxemburg" and "The Chocolate Soldier" - and because the sound of a piano over a stretch of water had always seemed beautiful to Dexter he lay perfectly quiet and listened. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I think ... it is somehow very useful, and maybe even essential, for a fine artist to have to somehow make his peace on the canvas with all the things he cannot do. That is what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call 'personality,' or maybe even 'pain.' — Kurt Vonnegut

The artist discards all theories, both his own and those of others. He forgets everything when he is in front of his canvas. — Georges Rouault

An artist does his most difficult work when he steps back from the blank canvas and thinks about what he is going to create. — Michelangelo

He was increasingly aware these days of how much he owned, of the ongoing effort his life required. The thousands of trips to the grocery store he had made, all the heaping bags of food, first paper, then plastic, now canvas sacks brought from home, unloaded from the trunk of the car and unpacked and stored in cupboards, all to sustain a single body. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Michael Bay and his team are experts in exciting tentpole-type film and television, and the combination of their film experience plus the great television writers that have come on will be really successful in bringing us something really unique. We are looking to put on these big canvas shows, and Black Sails is going to fit into that. The scripts have been terrific. Everything that we are trying to do is incredibly ambitious, and this is certainly in that category. — Chris Albrecht

When an artist captures a mountain or an ocean on a canvas with color and we wonder where such talent could come from, he or she is declaring His glory. — James MacDonald

Do you want to go make friends with it first? Dawn asked. Matthew,give Emily the snacks.
Collins swallowed, looking alarmed. Um ... what do you mean?
Dawn smiled at him. So we can give them to the horse! The carrot sticks?
Oh, Collins said, after a pause. You see, you should have told me we were bringing snacks for the horse. I thought they were for us. My bad.
Wait, you ate all of them? Dawn asked, taking her canvas bag back from Collins peering inside. The apple too? And where are the sugar cubes?
You're telling me we brought the sugar for a horse? Collins asked,incredulous. What does a horse need sugar for?
I can't believe you just ate raw sugar cubes, Dawn said, shaking her head.
They're sugar cubes! Collins said, his voice rising. What else are you supposed to do with them? And since when do horses get snacks? — Morgan Matson

The laws of physics are the canvas God laid down on which to paint his masterpiece. Vittoria — Dan Brown

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

If you will observe, it doesn't take A man of giant mould to make A giant shadow on the wall; And he who in our daily sight Seems but a figure mean and small, Outlined in Fame's illusive light, May stalk, a silhouette sublime, Across the canvas of his time. — John Townsend Trowbridge

Chavez will hit the canvas. He will be sitting in his corner, or with the doctor or referee stopping the fight. There's no other outcome. — Sergio Martinez

Fowls are to the kitchen what his canvas is to the painter. — Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

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

However," he continued, "this canvas is preferable to the paintings of that varlet Rubens, with his mountains of Flemish flesh sprinkled with vermilion, his waves of red hair and his medley of colors. — Honore De Balzac

We're trying to do what Miles Davis would have wanted us to do, which is approach it as artists with his life as the canvas. — Don Cheadle

Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to ...
How different everything is for the craftsman who ... can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object
whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug
and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see. — Alain De Botton

I'm ... getting there. I'm beginning to think that maybe it's okay to be a blank canvas. Maybe it's okay that my future is unknown. And maybe," I say with another smile, "it's okay to be inspired by the people who do know their future." "It goes both ways, you know." I link his icicle fingers through mine. "What does?" "Artists are inspired by blank canvases." My smile grows wider. — Stephanie Perkins

I have tried to preserve in my relationship to the film the same closeness and intimacy that exists between a painter and his canvas. — Norman McLaren

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. they would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive. (Dorian Gray regarding his portrait) — Oscar Wilde

Painter"
"I said you are only keeping me here
in the hospital, lying to my parents
and saying I am madder than I am,
because you only want to keep me here,
squeezing my last dollar to the pennies
I'm saner than anyone in the hospital.
I had to say what every madman says
a black phrase, the sleep of reason mothers monsters ...
When I am painting the canvas is a person;
all I do, each blot and line's alive,
when I am finished, it is shit on the canvas ...
But in his sketches more finished than his oils,
sketches made after he did those masterpieces,
constable can make us see the breeze ... — Robert Lowell

Salem"

In salem seasick spindrift drifts or skips
to the canvas flapping on the seaward panes
until the knitting sailor stabs at ships
nosing like sheep of Morpheus through his brain's
asylum. Seaman, seaman, how the draft
lashes the oily slick about your head,
beating up whitecaps! Seaman, Charon's raft
dumps its damned goods into the harbor-bed,--
There sewage sickens the rebellious seas.
Remember, seaman, Salem fisherman
Once hung their nimble fleets on the Great Banks.
Where was it that New England bred the men
who quartered the Leviathan's fat flanks
and fought the British Lion to his knees? — Robert Lowell

Seldom was blue for blue's sake present till Pollock hurled pigment at his canvas like pies. — William H Gass

He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood. — Oscar Wilde

When Earth's last picture is painted And the tubes are twisted and dried When the oldest colors have faded
And the youngest critic has died
We shall rest, and faith, we shall need it
Lie down for an aeon or two
'Till the Master of all good workmen Shall put us to work anew
And those that were good shall be happy They'll sit in a golden chair
They'll splash at a ten league canvas With brushes of comet's hair
They'll find real saints to draw from Magdalene, Peter, and Paul
They'll work for an age at a sitting And never be tired at all.
And only the Master shall praise us. And only the Master shall blame.
And no one will work for the money.
No one will work for the fame.
But each for the joy of the working, And each, in his separate star,
Will draw the thing as he sees it.
For the God of things as they are! — Rudyard Kipling

He spread his paint on canvas-here light, there dark-till it looked like a streaked agate stone, and then "with little trouble," he made a finished painting emerge surprisingly out of the chaos of mixed paint. — E.H. Gombrich

He can hit a man in the liver so the blood flow stops. It takes a full second before the pain registers and the man falls. I've seen Billy hook men's livers and punch at their hearts. I've seen him break a man's nose in the ring, shatter an eardrum, close an eye. I've seen him hit a man so hard, fist to jaw, the man seemed to fall asleep before he fell, his body so relaxed his face looked calm even when his head slammed against canvas. — Adam Berlin

Norman Rockwell spent his career painting pictures that helped people understand their own feelings ... pictures that enriched their own experiences and celebrated their own lives. But the art establishment branded him an 'illustrator', a sentimental one at that. Real artists, they said were doing art for art's sake, not for the sake of the bourgeois public. Real artists were putting swiggles, smears or daubs of paint on the canvas. They were doing 'innovative' and 'creative' work. If they were hideous and grotesque; we know that's what life really is! — Bill Bonner

He kisses me like I'm his canvas. — Colleen Hoover

I move with him, letting him touch me, kiss me, taste my body like I'm his canvas and he's painting me with his tongue. — Lauren Blakely

The dreams came. The memories. More vivid than ever before. As if the depth of his exhaustion had created the perfect canvas for them. — James Dashner

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

What the painter adds to the canvas are the days of his life. The adventure of living, hurtling toward death. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Manet wanted one day to paint my wife and children. Renoir was there. He took a canvas and began painting them, too. After a while, Manet took me aside and whispered, 'You're on very good terms with Renoir and take an interest in his future - do advise him to give up painting! You can see for yourself that it's not his metier at all. — Claude Monet

An art critic is someone who hopes to see his ideas translated to canvas without having to learn how to paint. — Robert Breault

Sargent, when he painted the size of life, placed his canvas on a level with the model, walked back until canvas and sitter were equal before his eye, and was thus able to estimate the construction and values of his representation ... — William Rothenstein

The moon is the lamp he paints by; His canvas the window pane; His brush is a frozen snowflake; Jack Frost the artist's name. — C.C. Long

Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter "repented," changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now. — Lillian Hellman

I'm like the painter with his nose to the canvas, fussing over details. Gazing from a distance, the reader sees the big picture. — Steven Saylor

The Apotheosis of Washington - a 4,664-square-foot fresco that covers the canopy of the Capitol Rotunda - was completed in 1865 by Constantino Brumidi. Known as "The Michelangelo of the Capitol," Brumidi had laid claim to the Capitol Rotunda in the same way Michelangelo had laid claim to the Sistine Chapel, by painting a fresco on the room's most lofty canvas - the ceiling. Like Michelangelo, Brumidi had done some of his finest work inside the Vatican. Brumidi, however, immigrated to America in 1852, abandoning God's largest shrine in favor of a new shrine, the U.S. Capitol, which now glistened with examples of his mastery - from the trompe l'oeil of the Brumidi Corridors to the frieze ceiling of the Vice President's Room. And yet it was the enormous image hovering above the Capitol Rotunda that most historians considered to be Brumidi's masterwork. Robert — Dan Brown

There are some people who may not like precision in their art. They may like it to be grittier and more gestural, more of a direct expression in the way that a painter would put his strokes on canvas. — Adrian Tomine

And thus they form a perfect group; he walks back two or three paces, selects his point of sight, and begins to sketch a hurried outline. He has finished it before they move; he hears their voices, though he cannot hear their words, and wonders what they can be talking of. Presently he walks on, and joins them.
'You have a corpse there, my friends?' he says.
'Yes; a corpse washed ashore an hour ago.'
'Drowned?'
'Yes, drowned; - a young girl, very handsome.'
'Suicides are always handsome,' he says; and then he stands for a little while idly smoking and meditating, looking at the sharp outline of the corpse and the stiff folds of the rough canvas covering.
Life is such a golden holiday to him young, ambitious, clever - that it seems as though sorrow and death could have no part in his destiny. ("The Cold Embrace") — Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Persecution inspires men who otherwise would have remained dormant. As pain whips the painter, his brush whips the canvas. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Some of his pieces were quite good. Others-especially when he'd been drinking-looked like he'd accidentally spilled paint on canvas. — Richelle Mead

You still talk to your horses."
I jerked and Sackett shifted, not liking the spike of energy that shot through me or the fact that my fingers had yanked at his mane.
Moses stood silhouetted in the barn door, holding what looked to be a large canvas in his hand.
I hadn't realized I was still talking to Sackett, and I did a quick examination of what I'd just said. I believe I had just uttered an embarrassing rant on Moses not being allowed in Georgia. Oh, Lord, I prayed fervently, you can make the blind man see and the deaf man hear, so it shouldn't be too much to ask to make this man forget everything he's just seen and heard.
"What does Sackett think about those new, stricter laws in Georgia?"
I looked up at the rafters, "Hey, thanks for comin' through for me, Lord. — Amy Harmon

I once had a drinking contest with an artist on his yacht... It amused him as I took shot after shot, and I realized that this was the reason he'd invited us, his amusement. Looking back, I thought he didn't expect we'd have anything to say, that my questions about the artist's purpose, his existential quest for self in a communally-brutalized past, were not as amusing as they were thought-provoking, but I'll never know. As I swayed like a sailor in drunken bitterness, I felt something had been sacrificed to his art. He'd gone so far out on that boat there was no way for him to come back. I felt he no longer existed and was just the faded intention of color on canvas. His humanity had surely been washed away with the paint thinner. — Megan Rich