“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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“They are swatting us like flies,’ a Soviet infantryman on the Finnish front complained in December 1939. By the time the conflict was over, more than 126,000 Soviet troops had been killed and another 300,000 evacuated from the front because of injury, disease or frostbite. Finnish losses were also severe, indeed proportionately even more so, at 50,000 killed and 43,000 wounded. Nevertheless, there was no doubt that the Finns had given the Soviets a bloody nose. Their troops showed not only courage and determination, fuelled by strong nationalist commitment, but also ingenuity. Borrowing from the example of Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War, the Finns took empty bottles of spirits, filled them with kerosene and other chemicals, stuck a wick in each of them, then lit them and threw them at incoming Soviet tanks, covering them with flames. ‘I never knew a tank could burn for quite that long,’ said a Finnish veteran. They devised a new name for the projectile, too: in honour of the Soviet Foreign Minister they called them ‘Molotov cocktails’.”
― Richard J. Evans, quote from The Third Reich at War
“Físicamente, vivimos más tiempo que en el pasado, pero la percepción del tiempo es mucho más rápida. Los eses corren, los años vuelan. Algunos están en la cumbre de su juventud psíquica, pero se miran y descubren que tienen setenta u ochenta años.”
― Augusto Cury, quote from The Dreamseller: The Calling
“While it was true that the president of the United States was the world’s ultimate juggler of tasks, it was also a fact that the First Lady, traditionally, was no slouch in that department either.”
― David Baldacci, quote from First Family
“do what your heart tells you, not your pride.”
― Kavita Kané, quote from Karna's Wife: The Outcast's Queen
“As I look back, I see that life is like a game of solitaire and every once in a while there is a move.”
― James Salter, quote from A Sport and a Pastime
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