Romare Quotes & Sayings

Phury knelt beside him and stroked his face. "I've only ever had you to live for. If you die I have nothing.
I'm utterly lost. And you are needed here."
Zsadist tried to reach out, but couldn't lift his arms as Phury stood up.
"God, Z, I keep thinking this tragedy of ours is going to be over. But it just keeps going, doesn't it?"
Zsadist blacked out to the sound of his twin's boots heading from the room. — J.R. Ward

You put down one color and it calls for an answer. You have to look at it like a melody. — Romare Bearden

You don't paint what you see, you paint what you feel. — Romare Bearden

Art is the soul of a people. — Romare Bearden

Since God doesn't do anything for them ... Do I have any choice but to help them on my own? — Minari Endou

What I've attempted to do is establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic. — Romare Bearden

But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience. — Romare Bearden

We were no longer, technically, children although in many ways I am quite sure that we were. Childish has become a term of contempt.
"Don't be childish, darling."
"I hope to Christ I am. Don't be childish yourself."
It is possible to be grateful that no one that you would willingly associate with you say, "Be mature. Be well-balanced, be well-adjusted."
Africa, being as old as it is, makes all people except the professional invaders and spoilers into children. No one says to anyone in Africa, "Why don't you grow up?" ...
Men know that they are children in relation to the country and, as in armies, seniority and senility ride close together. But to have the heart of a child is not a disgrace. It is an honor. A man must comport himself as a man ... But it is never a reproach that he has kept a child's heart, a child's honesty and a child's freshness and nobility. — Ernest Hemingway,

Painting is the act of discovery and you're constantly enlarging your horizon or finding yourself every time you paint. — Romare Bearden

Memory embellishes Life. Forgetfulness makes it possible. — Romare Bearden

If you're any kind of artist, you make a miraculous journey, and you come back and make some statements in shapes and colors of where you were. — Romare Bearden

But now I discovered the wonderful power of wine. I understood why men become drunkards. For the way it worked on me was not at all that it blotted out these sorrows, but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and revered for feeling them. — C.S. Lewis

When I conjure these memories, they are of the present to me, because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time. — Romare Bearden

I want to see how life can triumph. — Romare Bearden

You should always respect what you are and your culture because if your art is going to mean anything, that is where it comes from. — Romare Bearden

I'm going to be your grandpa! / I have the biggest smile. / I've been waiting to meet you for such a long, long while. — Billy Crystal

Black art has always existed. It just hasn't been looked for in the right places. — Romare Bearden

The most difficult object in painting is yourself because you're always at issue — Romare Bearden

Eventually, competition and adventure wane, and I enter my ibuprofen phase. Tweaky hamstrings and achy knees restrict mileage, but I continue running for health, sanity, and the ritual of a Sunday trail run with like-minded buddies. We discuss the nagging injuries that bedevil us, and remember the good old days when we were kings. — Don Kardong

Sometimes the mind relives things very clearly for us ... There are roads out of secret places within us along which we all must move as we go to touch others. — Romare Bearden

The essence of art is to recapturel the fantasy and the imagination of a child again, but without the innocence of a child. — Romare Bearden

The function of the artist is to organize the facets of life according to his imagination. — Romare Bearden

Painting is a self-disciplined activity that you have to learn by yourself. — Romare Bearden

One of the facets of growing up the way I did, I never had the experience of being solely in the black community. Even my family, my mother is what they call Creole, so she's part French, part black, and grew up in Louisiana. It's a very specific kind of blackness that is different than what is traditionally thought of as the black community and black culture. So, I never felt a part of whatever that was. — Justin Simien

From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality. — August Wilson

The artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs. — Romare Bearden

Practically all great artists accept the influence of others. But ... the artist with vision sees his material, chooses, changes, and by integrating what he has learned with his own experiences, finally molds something distinctly personnel. — Romare Bearden

A terrorist attack is like a wasp sting. It may be very painful, but it does not kill the host. It only makes the host more determined to find the nest and destroy it. — Karlyle Tomms

My world view is somewhat unique. I have learned from many great philosophers including Plato, Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, Darwin, Tagore, Emerson, and many more. — Debasish Mridha

The artist confronts chaos. The whole thing of art is, how do you organize chaos? — Romare Bearden

My purpose is to paint the life of my people as I know it. — Romare Bearden

Every artist wants his work to be permanent. But what is? The Aswan Dam covered some of the greatest art in the world. Venice is sinking. Great books and pictures were lost in the Florence floods. In the meantime we still enjoy butterflies. — Romare Bearden

How singular is the thing called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it; for they never come to a man together, and yet he who pursues either of them is generally compelled to take the other. They are two, and yet they grow together out of one head or stem; and I can not help thinking that if Aesop had noticed them, he would have made a fable about God trying to reconcile their strife, and when he could not, he fastened their heads together; and this is the reason why when one comes the other follows, as I find in my own case pleasure comes following after the pain in my leg which was caused by the chain. — Plato

One cannot be betrayed if one has no people. — Takeru Kobayashi

Places changing and people with them, dreams shifting ever further beyond reach. — Ian Rankin

It was not my aim to paint about the Negro in America in terms of propaganda. It is to depict the life of my people as I know it, passionately and dispassionately as Brueghel. — Romare Bearden

The artist has to be exactly the opposite [of people singing the song, I've gotta be Me,] and transcend himself as he makes judgements. — Romare Bearden

I was just doing bits and pieces of acting in the U.K. I'd been in the film 'Breaking and Entering' - Anthony Minghella gave me my start and I miss him dearly. Then I made the trip out to L.A., during one of their pilot seasons, which was when they were developing 'Gossip Girl,' and I auditioned, and things came together. — Ed Westwick

Jem spoke with enormous care; talking to Will about anything personal was like trying not to startle away a wild animal. — Cassandra Clare

Just do a thing and don't talk about it. This is the great secret of success. — Sarah Grand