O'keeffe Quotes & Sayings

You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't. — Georgia O'Keeffe

One cannot be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something - anything I had done - than anyone else I know. — Georgia O'Keeffe

One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I believe an artist is the last person in the world who can afford to be affected. — Georgia O'Keeffe

To make your unknown known - that's the important thing. — Georgia O'Keeffe

Making your unknown known is the important thing - and keeping the unknown always beyond you - catching - crystalizing your simpler clearer vision of life - only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead - that you must always keep working to grasp ... — Georgia O'Keeffe

I don't need to be married to Georgia O'Keeffe or Lillian Hellman, but I like being with a woman I can look up to. — Alec Baldwin

I have things in my head that are not like what anyone taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me,so natural to my way of being and thinking. — Georgia O'Keeffe

RE: Lake George from a book by Lord. That's all I know.
There is something so perfect about the mountains and the lake and the trees ... sometimes I want to tear it all to pieces — Georgia O'Keeffe

It seems to me very important to the idea of democracy to the country and to the world eventually that all men and women stand equal under the sky. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I think it's so foolish for people to want to be happy. Happy is so momentary
you're happy for an instant and then you start thinking again. Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous. — Georgia O'Keeffe

War is killing the individual in it unless he has learned livingness - if he had it he wouldn't be a good soldier. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I took back a barrel of bones to New York. They were my symbols of the desert, but nothing more. I haven't seen enough to think of any other symbolism. The skulls were there and I could say something with them. — Georgia O'Keeffe

To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage. — Georgia O'Keeffe

So I said to myself-I'll paint what I see-what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it-I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I look at my work and make up my mind about it. After that, neither flattery nor criticism matters to me. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty. — Georgia O'Keeffe

You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare. — Georgia O'Keeffe

Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings. — Jerry Saltz

I find that I have painted my life - things happening in my life - without knowing. — Georgia O'Keeffe

Someone else's vision will never be as good as your own vision of your self. Live and die with it 'cause in the end it's all you have. Lose it and you lose yourself and everything else. I should have listened to myself. — Georgia O'Keeffe

Happiness goes like the wind, but what is interesting stays. — Georgia O'Keeffe

When you get so that you can't see, you come to it gradually. And if you didn't come by it gradually, I guess you'd just kill yourself when you couldn't see. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I've been afraid every single day of my life, but I've gone ahead and done it anyway. — Georgia O'Keeffe

One works because I suppose it is the most interesting thing one knows to do. The days one works are the best days. On the other days one is hurrying through the other things one imagines one has to do to keep one's life going ... — Georgia O'Keeffe

Some people say it is a shame. Others even imply that it would have been better if the baby had never been created. But the short time I had with my child is precious to me. It is painful to me, but I still wouldn't wish it away. I prayed that God would bless us with a baby. Each child is a gift, and I am proud that we cooperated with God in the creation of a new soul for all eternity. Although not with me, my baby lives. — Christine O'Keeffe Lafser

If only people were trees ... I might like them better. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I am trying with all my skill to do a painting that is all woman, as well as all of me. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I know I can not paint a flower, I can not paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning but maybe in terms of paint colour I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time. — Georgia O'Keeffe

The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho' it is vast and empty and untouchable ... and knows no kindness with all its beauty. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I realized that were I to paint flowers small, no one would look at them because I was unknown. So I thought I'll make them big, like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they'll have to look at them - and they did. — Georgia O'Keeffe

One day a hummingbird flew in
It fluttered against the window til I got it down where I could reach it with an open umbrella
When I had it in my hand it was so small I couldn't believe I had it
but I could feel the intense life
so intense and so tiny
... You were like the humming bird to me ...
And I am rather inclined to feel that you and I know the best part of one another without spending much time together
It is not that I fear the knowing
It is that I am at this moment willing to let you be what you are to me
it is beautiful and pure and very intensely alive. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I see no reason for painting anything that can be put into any other form as well. — Georgia O'Keeffe

God told me if I painted that mountain enough, I could have it. — Georgia O'Keeffe

It seems to be my mission in life to wait on a dog. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I am not an exponent of expressionism. I don't know exactly what that means, but I don't like the sound of it. I dislike cults and isms. I want to paint in terms of my own thinking and feeling. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I decided to accept as true my own thinking. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I'm glad I want everything in the world - good and bad - bitter and sweet - I want it all. — Georgia O'Keeffe

When I found the beautiful white bones in the desert I picked them up and took them home too ... I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it. — Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe moved to rural New Mexico, from which she would sign her letters to the people she loved, "from the faraway nearby." It was a way to measure physical and psychic geography together. Emotion has its geography, affection is what is nearby, within the boundaries of the self. You can be a thousand miles from the person next to you in bed or deeply invested in the survival of a stranger on the other side of the world. — Rebecca Solnit

I don't know what Art is but I know some things it isn't when I see them. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I wish so much to go that I almost wish I had never been there. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I have lived on a razors edge. So what if you fall off. I'd rather be doing something I wanted to do. I'd walk it again. — Georgia O'Keeffe

Sometimes I start in a very realistic fashion, and as I go on from one painting to another of the same kind, it becomes simplified until it can be nothing but abstraction. — Georgia O'Keeffe

It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O'Keeffe I'd once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple of weeks after we left the Mayo Clinic, and then, once she was admitted to the hospice wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to the others, more modest and true. I imagined my mother in October; I wrote the scene in my mind. And then the one of my mother in August and another in May. Each day that passed, another month peeled away. — Cheryl Strayed

It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it. — Georgia O'Keeffe

He wanted head and hands and arms on a pillow - in many different positions. I was asked to move my hands in many different ways - also my head - and I had to turn this way and that. There were nudes that might have been of several different people - sitting - standing - even standing upon the radiator against the window - that was difficult - radiators don't intend you to stand on top of them. (On being photographed by Alfred Stieglitz) — Georgia O'Keeffe

I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at - not copy it. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I am divided between my man and a life with him---and some thing of the outdoors---of your world---that is in my blood---and that I know I will never get rid of--- I have to get along with my divided self the best way I can--- — Georgia O'Keeffe

Filling a space in a beautiful way - that is what art means to me. — Georgia O'Keeffe

My first memory is of light
the brightness of light
light all around. — Georgia O'Keeffe

It is really so nice here-country-busy-busy with so many different kinds of things- ... I must say I feel far away in another world here- ... always we go to a new place ... the people have a kind of gentleness that isn't usual on the mainland. — Georgia O'Keeffe

Hack, hack, hack. I wouldn't pay twenty-five cents to spit on a Georgia O'Keeffe painting. And I think she's a horrible person, too. I know her ... So arrogant, so sure of herself. I'm sure she's carrying a dildo in her purse. — Truman Capote

You paint from your subject, not what you see ... I rarely paint anything I don't know very well. It was surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint. — Georgia O'Keeffe

We'd make love. Afterwards he would take photographs of me. (On modeling for Alfred Stieglitz) — Georgia O'Keeffe

I know I am unreasonable about people but there are so many wonderful people whom I can't take the time to know. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see - and I don't. — Georgia O'Keeffe

Whether the flower or the color is the focus I do not know. I do know the flower is painted large to convey my experience with the flower - and what is my experience if it is not the color? — Georgia O'Keeffe

When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I'm gone. — Georgia O'Keeffe

The clean clear colours 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, '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. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I don't really know where I got my artists idea. The scraps of what I remember do not explain to me where it came from. I only know that by this time it was definitely settled in my mind. — Georgia O'Keeffe

On the way I stood a moment looking out across the marshes with tall cattails, a patch of water, more marsh, then the woods with a few birch trees shining white at the edge on beyond. In
the darkness it all looked just like I felt. Wet and swampy and gloomy, very gloomy. In the morning I painted it. My memory of it is that it was probably my best painting that summer — Georgia O'Keeffe

Slits in nothingness are not very easy to paint. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I have a single track mind. I work on an idea for a long time. It's like getting acquainted with a person, and I don't get acquainted easily. — Georgia O'Keeffe

Now and then when I get an idea for a picture, I think, how ordinary. Why paint that old rock? Why not go for a walk instead? But then I realise that to someone else it may not seem so ordinary. — Georgia O'Keeffe

That nervous energy that makes people like you and I want and go after everything in the world - bump our heads on all the hard walls and scratch our hands on all the briars - but it makes living great - doesn't it - I'm glad I want everything in the world - good and bad - bitter and sweet - I want it all and a lot of it too — Georgia O'Keeffe

I never knew [Alfred Stieglitz] to make a trip anywhere to photograph. His eye was in him, and he used it on anything that was nearby. Maybe that way he was always photographing himself. — Georgia O'Keeffe

My first memory is of the brightness of light ... light all around. I was sitting among pillows on a quilt on the ground ... very large white pillows ... — Georgia O'Keeffe

I have been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I have never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do. — Georgia O'Keeffe

Women who stay true to themselves are always more interesting and beautiful to me: women like Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe and Anna Magnani - women who have style, chic, allure and elegance. They didn't submit to any standard of beauty - they defined it. — Isabella Rossellini

Did you ever have something to say and feel as if the whole side of the wall wouldn't be big enough to say it on, and then sit down on the floor and try to get it onto a sheet of charcoal paper? — Georgia O'Keeffe

Anyone who doesn't feel the crosses simply doesn't get that country. — Georgia O'Keeffe

The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I'm one of the best painters. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I like an empty wall because I can imagine what I like on it. — Georgia O'Keeffe

Fill a space in a beautiful way. — Georgia O'Keeffe

Anyway, what do women grab when they're nervous and sitting at their desks? Do they slip their hands inside their panties? What a distracting thought. Just the word panty is distracting. I love that word; it implies so much. I love how women look in panties, how they're flat in the front. I'm thirty-five, but sometimes it's still this beautiful amazing shock to me that women don't have penises. They just have this lovely little mound of hair and then this tucked away glorious hole. Hole. Wait. Hole sounds vulgar. Is passageway better? Pretty envelope? Georgia O'Keeffe flower? Pussy? Pussy is good. I like the word pussy. Tucked away beautiful pussy. I wish I could put my face in one right now and sing out, I love you! — Jonathan Ames

I decided to start anew-to strip away what I had been taught, to accept as true my own thinking. This was one of the best times of my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing, no one interested, no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown-no one to satisfy but myself. I began with charcoal and paper and decided not to use any color until it was impossible to do what I wanted to do in black and white. I believe it was June before I needed blue. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I keep thinking: 'Georgia O'Keeffe wouldn't have had Botox.' — Gloria Steinem

Artists and religionists are never far apart, they go to the sources of revelation for what they choose to experience and what they report is the degree of their experiences. Intellect
wishes to arrange - intuition wishes to accept. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I'd been taught to paint like other people, and I thought, what's the use? I couldn't do any better than they, or even as well. I was just adding to the brushpile. So I quit. — Georgia O'Keeffe

The primary task for the executive targeting first 100 days success is to set out the right strategic priorities and stay focused on them. — Niamh O'Keeffe

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not. — Georgia O'Keeffe

In my home country, there was a little shop with old books, but it was really in the countryside. You couldn't find English books. I found this very avant-garde American art book that had information about Georgia O'Keeffe. I was very much impressed by her. — Yayoi Kusama

When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me-some of them more than sixty years ago-I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives. If the person in the photographs were living in this world today, she would be quite a different person-but it doesn't matter-Stieglitz photographed her then. — Georgia O'Keeffe

The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move. — Georgia O'Keeffe

When people read erotic symbols into my painting, they're really thinking about their own affairs. — Georgia O'Keeffe

Before I put brush to canvas, I question, 'Is this mine? ... Is it influenced by some idea which I have acquired from some man? ... I am trying with all my skill to do a painting that is all of women, as well as all of me. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I am tired of the cult of youth. The cultural rejection of old age, the stigmatization of wrinkles, grey hair, of bodies furrowed by the years. I am fascinated by Diana Vreeland, Georgia O'Keeffe and Louise Bourgeois, women who have let time embrace them without ever cheating. Society today condemns this, me, I celebrate it. — Tom Ford

I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are. — Georgia O'Keeffe

The simple fact of yourself ... there it is ... just you ... no excitement about it ... a very simple fact ... the only thing you have ... keep it as clear as you can. — Georgia O'Keeffe

My center does not come from my mind - it feels in me like a plot of warm moist well tilled earth with the sun shining hot on it ... It seems I would rather feel starkly empty than let any thing be planted that cannot be tended to the fullest possibility of its growth ... — Georgia O'Keeffe

Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things. — Georgia O'Keeffe

The truth is this. It isn't about winning anymore. It hasn't been about winning for a long time. It's about surviving."


"There were no negotiations, no attempts at making some kind of peace. When their ships landed along the coast, they knew what that had come here for. They came here to kill and that's what they've done."


"Listen friend. The city is lost, and we have very little time. What's your name?"
"Andor. — Brendan O'Keeffe