33 Quotes by Anne Truitt

By keeping on being what we most intimately are, we can continually redefine ourselves so that we become what we have not been able to be. If we live this way, we surprise ourselves

It is as if I had to take Sam back into the uterus to protect him, to reestablish the placental connection in order to nourish him through his crisis. Perhaps because of this primitive reaction, his recovery is marked by an increasing independence for both of us, a feeling of health and ease as if, in some mysterious way, he had accomplished his second birth, into adulthood, by means of this violent accident.

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.

By feeling their pain, I protected myself from my own.

The first birth is documented. A doctor stands by; physical facts are readily available; literature abounds in accounts of birth. Folk knowledge hammocks the pregnant woman; she sways in the gentle wind of attention. Not so with the second birth into adulthood. That is a solitary business for the parent. The course of events is not documented--cannot be, as each child tears the connective tissue differently.

...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.

I refused, and still refuse, the inflated definition of artists as special people with special prerogatives and special excuses.

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

Artists have no choice but to express their lives. They have only, and that not always, a choice of process. This process does not change the essential content of their work in art, which can only be their life.