Quotes by Georgia O'Keeffe

• I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something - anything I had done - than anyone else I know.
• I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.
• I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.
• I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at - not copy it.
• I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.
• I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.
• I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.
• I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.
• I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.
• I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.
• Anyone who doesn't feel the crosses simply doesn't get that country.
• I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.
• When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.
• It was all so far away - there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.
• Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time - like to have a friend takes time.
• One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.
• One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.
• I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life - and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.
• It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.
• Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue - that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished.
• The days you work are the best days.
• To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.
• Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.
• Marks on paper are free - free speech - press - pictures all go together I suppose.
• I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.