229 Quotes by Georgia O'Keeffe

You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower – and I don’t.

To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.

The skulls were there and I could say something with them. To me they are as beautiful as anything I know. To me they are strangely more living than the animals walking around – hair, eyes and all, with the tails switching. The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable – and knows no kindness with all its beauty.

I’m getting to like you so tremendously that it sometimes scares me.

I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions – no one seeing what they are.

The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I’m one of the best painters.

I realized that I had things in my head not like what I had been taught – not like what I had seen – shapes and ideas so familiar to me that it hadn’t occurred to me to put them down. I decided to stop painting, to put away everything I had done, and to start to say the things that were my own.

I’m frightened all the time. But I never let it stop me. Never!

I am not an exponent of expressionism. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I don’t like the sound of it. I dislike cults and isms. I want to paint in terms of my own thinking and feeling.