Emily Carr Quotes

57 Sourced Quotes

Let me not fuss and fret at my incompetence but be still and know that Thou art God.

Emily Carr
There is no right and wrong way to paint except honestly or dishonestly. Honestly is trying for the bigger thing. Dishonestly is bluffing and getting through a smattering of surface representation with no meaning.

Emily Carr
The foolish square calves pretend to be frightened of our train. Bluffers! Haven't they seen it every day since they were born? It's just an excuse to shake the joy out of their heels.

Emily Carr
I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grew.

Emily Carr
Look at the earth crowded with growth, new and old bursting from their strong roots hidden in the silent, live ground, each seed according to its own kind...each one knowing what to do, each one demanding its own rights on the earth. So artist, you too from the depths of your soul...let your roots creep forth, gaining strength.

Emily Carr
It is not all bad, this getting old, ripening. After the fruit has got its growth it should juice up and mellow. God forbid I should live long enough to ferment and rot and fall to the ground in a squash.

Emily Carr
Got a new pup. He is half griffon. The other half is mistake.

Emily Carr
Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence.

Emily Carr
Art being so much greater than ourselves, it will not give up once it has taken hold.

Emily Carr
Indians do not hinder the progress of their dead by embalming or tight coffining. When the spirit has gone they give the body back to the earth. the earth welcomes the body-coaxes new life and beauty from it, hurries over what men shudder at. Lovely tender herbage bursts from the graves, swiftly, exulting over corruption.

Emily Carr
There was neither horizon, cloud, nor sound; of that pink, spread silence even I had become part, belonging as much to sky as to earth.

Emily Carr
If you're going to lick the icing off somebody else's cake you won't be nourished and it won't do you any good,—or you might find the cake had caraway seeds and you hate them.

Emily Carr
Sometimes I could quit paint and take to charring. It must be fine to clean perfectly, to shine and polish and know that it could not be done better. In painting that never occurs.

Emily Carr
Oh I do want that thing, that oneness of movement that will catch the thing up into one movement and sing - harmony of life.

Emily Carr
Enter into the life of the trees. Know your relationship and understand their language, unspoken, unwritten talk. Answer back to them with their own dumb magnificence, soul words, earth words, the God in you responding to the God in them.

Emily Carr
The spirit must be felt so intensely that it has power to call others in passing, for it must pass, not stop in the pictures...

Emily Carr
The earth is soaked and soggy with rain. Everything is drinking its fill and the surplus gluts the drains. The sky is full of it and lies low over the earth, heavy and dense. Even the sea is wetter than usual!

Emily Carr
The biggest part of painting perhaps is faith, and waiting receptively, content to go any way, not planning or forcing. The fear, though, is laziness. It is so easy to drift and finally be tossed up on the beach, derelict.

Emily Carr
There is a side of friendship that develops better and stronger by correspondence than contact... The absence of the flesh in writing perhaps brings souls nearer.

Emily Carr
The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion.

Emily Carr
Art is an aspect of God and there is only one God, but different people see Him in different ways. Though He is always the same He doesn't always look the same...

Emily Carr
I wonder why we are always sort of ashamed of our best parts and try to hide them. We don't mind ridicule of our 'sillinesses' but of our 'sobers'.

Emily Carr
Go out there into the glory of the woods. See God in every particle of them expressing glory and strength and power, tenderness and protection. Know that they are God expressing God made manifest.

Emily Carr
I made myself into an envelope into which I could thrust my work deep, lick the flap, seal it from everybody.

Emily Carr
Real art is religion, a search for the beauty of God deep in all things.

Emily Carr
I can rise above the humility of my failure with an intense desire to search deeper and a blind faith that some day my sight may pierce through the veils that hide. I know God's face is there if I keep my gaze steady enough.

Emily Carr
The house begins to be a home. The unfamiliar places are beginning to fold the familiar objects into their keeping and to cozy them down. Objects that swore at each other when the movers heaved them into the new rooms have subsided into corners and sit to lick their feet and wash their faces like cats accepting a new home.

Emily Carr