Truitt Quotes & Sayings

vulnerability is a guardian of integrity — Anne Truitt

No one questions the fact that verbal language has to be learned, but the commonplaceness of visual experience betrays art; people tend to assume that, because they can see, they can see art. — Anne Truitt

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment. "The most demanding part of living a lifetimes as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity." Anne Truitt, the sculptor, said this. Thoreau said it another way: know your own bone. "Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life ... Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still. — Annie Dillard

This life, a gift of grace for an unknown reason, must be lived purely, because at death we return with its accruements to our source. Life is entrusted to us, does not belong to us, and has to be restored in honorable condition. We are responsible for this trust, and must live with this fact in mind. — Anne Truitt

When I speak now, my experience in art wells up so articulately that I am surprised even while I am talking. I move around a podium as easily as if it were my living room and although I am keyed up I am not anxious. I feel as if I were doing what I should be doing - the feeling I have when intent in my studio. — Anne Truitt

I never decided at all to be an artist; being an artist seems to have happened to me. — Anne Truitt

A mystery confounds the problem of industry in art. In the last analysis, to work is simply not enough. But we have to act as if it were, leaving reward aside. — Anne Truitt

I've struggled all my life to get maximum meaning in the simplest possible form, — Anne Truitt

I have no home but me. — Anne Truitt

The more visible my work became, the less visible I grew to myself. — Anne Truitt

The knowledge of personal failure ... is the invaluable predicate of all honest compassion. — Anne Truitt

She was the only one who made him hear music. The only one who made him feel home. The only one who wanted nothing more than for him to be plain, simple Will Truitt. — Jamie Farrell

Art comes into the highest part of the mind, with which we can know the presence of God. — Anne Truitt

Our society is monstrously disjunctive, at once so efficient in war and so inefficient in caring for the welfare of its members. It is frightening to see people rooting in garbage pails on streets, living in cardboard crates under bridges, while their government wages war. Even when there is an emergency in a household, decent parents do not forget to feed the children. — Anne Truitt

The hallmark of a decision in line with one's inner development is a feeling of having laid down a burden and picked up a more natural responsibility. — Anne Truitt

Perhaps the human lesson is always submission. We have a choice: to rebel or to recognize our powerlessness while maintaining our faith. — Anne Truitt

I notice that I have to pay careful attention in order to listen to others with an openness that allows them to be as they are, or as they think themselves to be. The shutters of my mind habitually flip open and click shut, and these little snaps form into patterns I arrange for myself. The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery. — Anne Truitt

I have slowly come to realize that a family is composed of people who are teaching one another. — Anne Truitt

I have been flooded with color on the inside, drab on the outside. — Anne Truitt

I had forgotten what sleep is like - a kingdom all its own. — Anne Truitt

Artists often lie behind on the field long after the art combine, the broad-bladed harvester of informed criticism, has mowed, bailed, and stored the crop. — Anne Truitt

It occurred to me that I could use the energy I had been putting into endurance to change my life. Yet the concept of brunt, of accepting and enduring, still seems to me to have a kind of nobility. It is, perhaps, less intelligent, but there is a stubborn selfhood about it that is dear to me. It can be, quite literally, the only way to survive. — Anne Truitt

The finest teaching touches in a student a spring neither teacher nor student could possibly have preconceived. — Anne Truitt

It is ultimately character that underwrites art. — Anne Truitt

The capacity to work feeds on itself and has its own course of development. This is what artists have going for them. — Anne Truitt

Their [artists'] essential effort is to catapult themselves wholly, without holding back one bit, into a course of action without having any idea where they will end up. They are like riders who gallop into the night, eagerly leaning on their horse's neck, peering into a blinding rain. And they have to do it over and over again. — Anne Truitt

I come to the point of using steel, and simply cannot. It's like the marriage proposal of a perfectly eligible man who just isn't loveable. It is wood I love. — Anne Truitt

Stories enabled you to forget your life and your limits. They urged you to reach for a world that was never meant to be yours. There was nothing more dangerous than an imagination. — Tiffany Truitt

The end of parenthood is implicit in its beginning: separation. — Anne Truitt

Humility is the daughter of truth. — Anne Truitt

There's a small still center into which conception can arrive. And when it arrives, you make it welcome with your experience. — Anne Truitt

We tend to mix genders when we arrange ourselves around a table for meetings. A sort of accommodation is made by the men for the women: they make space for us. they are ever-so-slightly polite, we are ever-so-slightly grateful. When we stand up at the end of a meeting, we all give ourselves a metaphorical shake that is only partly the relief of having concluded our business: we are all released from the effort of fitting ourselves together.
When men speak in these meetings, women relax; when women speak, men grow tense. I have the impression that they never know what a woman is going to say, whereas they are reasonably sure what a man will address himself to and how he will do it. So are the women; for them, too, men tend to be predictable. Women listen to women with a different kind of attention, and part of it may be loyalty to our gender; we want all of us to do well, as if we have the esprit de corps of subalterns among generals. — Anne Truitt

Maybe it's better to live in a world you don't understand, because if you understand it, it becomes unbearable. — Tiffany Truitt

The art of being officially old seems to lie in cooperative submission. — Anne Truitt

Artists have no choice but to express their lives, — Anne Truitt

In the range of my character at any given moment, I have acted in the only way it seemed to me I could have acted. This in no way means that I have done what was right; only what was possible for me. Sometimes I have done what I knew was wrong, and have rationalized. But rationalization is a form of desperation. It takes kindness to forgive oneself for one's life. — Anne Truitt

There is an appalling amount of mechanical work in the artist's life ... Talent is mysterious, but the qualities that guard, foster, and direct it are not unlike those of a good quartermaster. — Anne Truitt

I worked in between carpools and buying food and cooking and whatever else I had to do. I lived an outside life, but really I was living an inside life. — Anne Truitt

The shape of my work's development becomes a little clearer every time I am forced to articulate it. — Anne Truitt

Generosity is often the stalking horse of control. — Anne Truitt

Sometime, Mrs. Truitt, we work very hard at something, we exhaust ourselves to accomplish something which seems vital to us." He chose his words with care. "Our best hope for happiness. And sometimes we find that thing, only to find it has simply not been worth the effort. — Robert Goolrick

January is my favorite month, when the light is plainest, least colored. And I like the feeling of beginnings. — Anne Truitt