Illustrator Quotes

Günter Grass

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Beatrix Potter

Aubrey Beardsley

Tove Jansson

Edward Lear

John Tenniel

There are hurts so deep that one cannot reach them or heal them with words.

I plucked a honeysuckle where The hedge on high is quick with thorn, And climbing for the prize, was torn, And fouled my feet in quag-water; And by the thorns and by the wind The blossom that I took was thinn'd, And yet I found it sweet and fair.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

I'm telling you, the gorgeous of the world can actually look pretty intimidating when they scowl. Imagine a snow-white swan with a scary tattoo holding a chain saw. There's just no way to really prepare for that.

Never plan a picnic' Father said. 'Plan a dinner, yes, or a house, or a budget, or an appointment with the dentist, but never, never plan a picnic.

Elizabeth Enright

I believe that most of us would like to be thought well of by horses.

I find a particular delight in taking the caricature as far as I can. It satisfies me to stretch the human frame about and recreate it and yet keep a likeness.

The thing to be wished for, is not that the mountains should become easier, but that men should become wiser and stronger.

Even enlightened despots don't make very good teachers.

Facts are the barren branches on which we hang the dear, obscuring foliage of our dreams.

Natalie Babbitt

Project your mind into your subject until you actually live in it.

Didn't it make sense that after something horrible happens, something better should follow?

The last hour from midnight had lost half its quarters, and the stars went lifting up the great minutes...

Clemence Housman

Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.

The blackbirds are in this book, they're both pro the kids and against the kids. Just like fate. Sometimes it goes your way. Sometimes... and also a blackbird is from my passion for Schubert songs and his blackbirds and his birds of doom or birds of good. … some people were baffled that in the last big picture of that book, there's a crucifix on the wall of the children's house. Everybody assumes the hero and heroine are Jewish and the mother is Jewish. They're not. They're not. — That was my point. Those kids were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And all children were in the Holocaust. Everybody was in the Holocaust. So, I made sure my hero and heroine were not Jewish children. That was too easy. That was too easy.

Everything that I have told you is, of course, a fairy tale. Life is magical, after all. Nothing is safe and everything changes.

Trina Schart Hyman

Over the years I have learned that motherhood is much like an austere religious order, the joining of which obligates one to relinquish all claims to personal possessions.

If you don't know where you're going, stop racing to get there. — from Just Desert by M. T. Anderson

Chris Van Allsburg

No matter what part of nature one studies — microbes or Milky Ways — there is a point where one begins, but never an end.

The wall is silence, the grass is sleep, Tall trees of peace their vigil keep, And the Fairy of Dreams with moth-wings furled. Plays soft on her flute to the drowsy world.

Ida Rentoul Outhwaite

I couldn't do them if I didn't know horses lived behind them.

Charles Keeping

Everyone must imagine his own snakes because no one else's snakes can ever be as awful.

Drawing is giving yourself up to an exercise with no immediate application. It is a form of communion with your subject, be it in front of you or in your head. Expertise and skill go hand in hand with your desire to express feelings, to tell stories, to create and share worlds. It's personal.

John Howe (illustrator)

Can you know excellence if you've never seen it? Can you know good if you have seen only bad?

E. L. Konigsburg

Originality houses many rooms, and the views from the windows are all different.

Every sky with its varied tints and every feather of each bird were coloured by hand; and when it is considered that nearly two hundred and eighty thousand illustrations in the present work have been so treated, it will most likely cause some astonishment to those who give the subject a thought.