Georgia O'Keeffe Quotes

106 Sourced Quotes

My center does not come from my mind - it feels in me like a plot of warm moist well tilled earth with the sun shining hot on it... It seems I would rather feel starkly empty than let any thing be planted that cannot be tended to the fullest possibility of its growth...

Georgia O'Keeffe
Sometimes I start in a very realistic fashion, and as I go on from one painting to another of the same kind, it becomes simplified until it can be nothing but abstraction.

Georgia O'Keeffe
It always seems to me that so few people live - they just seem to exist and I don't see any reason why we shouldn't live always - til we die physically...

Georgia O'Keeffe
There is something so perfect about the mountains and the lake and the trees... sometimes I want to tear it all to pieces.

Georgia O'Keeffe
If one could only reproduce nature, and always with less beauty than the original, why paint at all?

Georgia O'Keeffe
That nervous energy that makes people like you and I want and go after everything in the world - bump our heads on all the hard walls and scratch our hands on all the briars - but it makes living great - doesn't it - I'm glad I want everything in the world - good and bad - bitter and sweet - I want it all and a lot of it too

Georgia O'Keeffe
I'm glad I want everything in the world - good and bad - bitter and sweet - I want it all.

Georgia O'Keeffe
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.

Georgia O'Keeffe
I always have a curious sort of feeling about some of my things - I hate to show them - I am perfectly inconsistent about it - I am afraid people won't understand - and I hope they won't - and am afraid they will.

Georgia O'Keeffe
He wanted head and hands and arms on a pillow - in many different positions. I was asked to move my hands in many different ways - also my head - and I had to turn this way and that. There were nudes that might have been of several different people - sitting - standing - even standing upon the radiator against the window - that was difficult - radiators don't intend you to stand on top of them. (On being photographed by Alfred Stieglitz)

Georgia O'Keeffe
The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one's life.

Georgia O'Keeffe
The simple fact of yourself... there it is... just you... no excitement about it... a very simple fact... the only thing you have... keep it as clear as you can.

Georgia O'Keeffe
His letters... have been like fine cold water when you are terribly thirsty...

Georgia O'Keeffe
A flower is relatively small... Still in a way-nobody sees a flower-so I said to myself-I'll paint it big.

Georgia O'Keeffe
I don't know what Art is but I know some things it isn't when I see them.

Georgia O'Keeffe
My painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me.

Georgia O'Keeffe