“Everybody works . . . . That's what life is. Work and a little play and a lot of prayer.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Girl in Hyacinth Blue
“If two people love the same thing, she reasoned, then they must love each other, at least a little, even if they never say it.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Girl in Hyacinth Blue
“In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Girl in Hyacinth Blue
“Work is love made plain, whether man’s work or woman’s work.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Girl in Hyacinth Blue
“How love builds itself unconsciously, he thought, out of the momentous ordinary.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Girl in Hyacinth Blue
“In the end, it's only the moments that we have.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Girl in Hyacinth Blue
“People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Girl in Hyacinth Blue
“The winsome lilt of Digna humming in the garden. Her knowing, almost teasing look, not quite a smile, when she knew she had the upper hand about something, and his willing acquiescence. Her coaxing in the dark next to him - What was your favorite part of the day? - to which he'd always say, because he always thought it - now, touching you. He'd feel the lump of truth form in his throat, the swell of love in his loins. And afterward, the peace of her rhythmic breathing, steady as a Frisian clock, her simple uncomposed lullaby. Those are things he would, in some final, stretched-out moment, relive. How love builds itself unconsciously, he thought, out of the momentous ordinary.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Girl in Hyacinth Blue
“The painting showed she did not yet know that lives end abruptly, that much of living is repetition and separation, that buttons forever need re-sewing no matter how ferociously one works the thread, that nice things almost happen.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Girl in Hyacinth Blue
“No one but another painter could know the delicacy required to balance the complexities, to keep reality at bay in order to remain in the innermost center of his work.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Girl in Hyacinth Blue
“Now he knew . . . that there was nothing so vital as paying attention, and perfecting the humble offices of love.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Girl in Hyacinth Blue
“She thought of all the people in all the paintings she had seen that day, not just Father's, in all the paintings of the world, in fact. Their eyes, the particular turn of a head, their loneliness or suffering or grief was borrowed by an artist to be seen by other people throughout the years who would never see them face to face. People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Girl in Hyacinth Blue
“It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials - I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered - it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Girl in Hyacinth Blue
“I came to see that knowing what love isn't might be just as valuable, though infinitely less satisfying, as knowing what it is.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Girl in Hyacinth Blue
“She was a desperate woman with frailties just like her, temptations just like her, a woman who had needs, a woman who loved almost to the point of there being no more her anymore, a woman who probably cried too much, just like her, a woman afraid, wanting to believe rather than believing [...]”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Girl in Hyacinth Blue
“The only place Aletta and I could be together unseen was just under the rafters in the church tower, a circumstance that propelled us into an earlier intimacy than what we would have known had we been permitted to walk together Sunday afternoons under the wide sky.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Girl in Hyacinth Blue
Susan Vreeland
Born place: in Racine, WI, The United States
Born date January 20, 1946
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“You’re right not to talk. It’s a sort of higher honesty, I think. Once you start talking, there’s no telling what you’ll say.”
― Marilynne Robinson, quote from Lila
“We’ve all been through a lot, Bryan, all of us. I know that some have been through more than others. But if we don’t expect more from each other, hope better for one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.”
― Bryan Stevenson, quote from Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
“The seeds sown in childhood put down deep roots. At”
― Stephen King, quote from End of Watch
“When you have so little, just the smallest thing can make you happy—and”
― Yeonmi Park, quote from In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom
“It's hard to believe that this is how it's done. That this is how we get here into the world, by accident or design, the microscopic pieces of ourselves borne by fluids and blood and growing into a tiny kingdom of cells inside someone else's body It seems so difficult to become alive. So improbable.”
― Dan Chaon, quote from You Remind Me of Me
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