Imagist Quotes & Sayings

I remember being an art student and going to the Whitney in 1974 to see the exhibition of Jim Nutt, the Chicago imagist. It was then I transferred to school in Chicago, all because of that show. — Jeff Koons

My job defines me, amuses me, thrills me and makes me feel like I am making a difference. — Kathryn Primm

It's important to see what we can do to make a difference, but it's more important to me to do it every single day. — Alicia Silverstone

I see and write things first as an artist, second as a woman, and third as a New Yorker. All three have built-in perspectives that aren't neutral. — Laurie Anderson

The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive - non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. the only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not. — Ad Reinhardt

The radical deficiency of imagist verse, as such, is in its lack of general ideas. Much of it might have been written by an infinitely sensitive decapitated frog. It is hemisphereless poetry. — Bliss Perry

Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent. — Randall Jarrell

Marrying you doesn't change who I am."
"No, but it changes who we are together. — Carian Cole

One of the things called forth by the Imagist movement in poetry was neatness; and when we say keenness, we mean neatness. A knife that is keen is also a knife that cuts neatly; it isn't brutal. Sharpness is different from brutality. Brutality is clumsy: it is wide - it has a lot of fist and thumb and no delicate finger. — Eli Siegel

Growing up around Amish farmland, I enjoyed the opportunity to witness firsthand their love of family, of the domestic arts - sewing, quilting, cooking, baking - as well as seeing them live out their tradition of faith in such a unique way. — Beverly Lewis