Portraits Quotes

1. "Offstage, she fixed him in place with compliments and ironic bossiness, and he tended not to look at her at all when they spoke. He was the only one in the band she called by name, implying a permanence to his position that was professionally reassuring but personally debilitating. When they wrote together or when one presented the other with something prepared in private, with no audience to absorb the excess, he felt the room crowding with their other selves, lives unled and correspondences unwritten, happiness opted against, and he could not believe she did not see it, too. He sweated to ornament her fears and tall tales and fake portraits, and with the remnants of his energy he hid the rest of himself from her. The best of him was a child's drawing of her on an off day."
Author: Arthur Phillips

2. "I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear."
Author: Cindy Sherman

3. "Painting self-portraits without clothes on has also given me some publicity."
Author: Cleo Moore

4. "I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressable tourists. They yawned at Balliol's quad, T.E. Lawrence's and Churchill's portraits, and the blackboard Einstein wrote his E=mc2 on. Then the tour guide said, 'And this is the Bridge of Sighs, where Lord Peter proposed (in Latin) to Harriet,' and everyone suddenly came to life and began snapping pictures. Such is the power of books."
Author: Connie Willis

5. "All we are doing are self-portraits. As simple that. We accumulate knowledge and wisdom and power, and we get our hearts broken, and we write. We write for others to absorb what took us so long to understand."
Author: Cristian Mihai

6. "It's the difference between your wife's passport photograph and the portraits you took when you gotengaged. Both may have been created with similar technology, but what stands in that great gulf between them are the passion you have for your wife, the knowledge you have of her personality, and your willingness to use your craft, time, and energy to express that. One says, "She looks like this." The other says, "This is who she is to me. It's how I feel about her. See how amazing she is?"
Author: David DuChemin

7. "There goes the dismantled—Love has fallen off her wall. A religious woman," he thought to himself, "without the joy and safety of the Catholic faith, which at a pinch covers up the spots on the wall when the family portraits take a slide; take that safety from a woman," he said to himself, quickening his step to follow her, "and love gets loose and into the rafters. She sees her everywhere," he added, glancing at Nora as she passed into the dark. "Out looking for what she's afraid to find—Robin. There goes mother of mischief, running about, trying to get the world home."
Author: Djuna Barnes

8. "A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself."
Author: Edvard Munch

9. "Why do these big old country houses always have family portraits in the dining room? Do you really want to eat with someone's gloomy great-grandfather looking down on you?"
Author: Elizabeth Jane Howard

10. "For the anarch, little has changed; flags have meaning for him, but not sense. I have seen them in the air and on the ground like leaves in May and November; and I have done so as a contemporary and not just as a historian. The May Day celebration will survive, but with a different meaning. New portraits will head up the processions. A date devoted to the Great Mother is re-profaned. A pair of lovers in the wood pays more homage to it. I mean the forest as something undivided, where every tree is still a liberty tree.For the anarch, little is changed when he strips off a uniform that he wore partly as fool's motley, partly as camouflage. It covers his spiritual freedom, which he will objectivate during such transitions. This distinguishes him from the anarchist, who, objectively unfree, starts raging until he is thrust into a more rigorous straitjacket."
Author: Ernst Jünger

11. "You painted all those characters into the paintings all over the school, and every one of them is a portrait of you, but in disguise. That's how you've been watching us. You spread yourself out through all those paintings. And since you are the original artist, nobody else can ever destroy the portraits. It was your way of assuring you could always keep an eye on things, even after death."
Author: G. Norman Lippert

12. "In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain."
Author: Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

13. "An important dimension of Tess of the d'Urbervilles is its debt to the oral tradition; to stories about wronged milkmaids, tales of superstition, and stories of love, betrayal and revenge, involving stock figures. This gives Tess of the d'Urbervilles an anti-realistic inflection. From the world of ballad and folktale Hardy draws such fateful coincidences as the failure of Angel to encounter Tess at the ‘Club-walking' on which he intrudes with his brothers, the letter to Angel that she accidentally slips under the carpet, the loss of her shoes when she tries to visit his family, and the family portraits on the wall of their honeymoon dwelling, as well as several omens. This chimes effectively with a world in which the rural folk have a superstitious and fatalistic attitude to life."
Author: Geoffrey Harvey

14. "All we can ever know about are the portraits of each other inside our own skulls."
Author: Greg Egan

15. "You alone in Europe are not ancient oh ChristianityThe most modern European is you Pope Pius XAnd you whom the windows observe shame keeps youFrom entering a church and confessing this morningYou read the prospectuses the catalogues the billboards that sing aloudThat's the poetry this morning and for the prose there are the newspapersThere are the 25 centime serials full of murder mysteriesPortraits of great men and a thousand different headlines("Zone")"
Author: Guillaume Apollinaire

16. "If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend."
Author: Héloïse D'Argenteuil

17. "Who would not have been laughed at if he had said in 1800 that metals could be extracted from their ores by electricity or that portraits could be drawn by chemistry.{Commenting on Henri Becquerel's process for extracting metals by voltaic means.}"
Author: Henri Becquerel

18. "Our men have been real Frenchmen, and their wives--I may say it--have been worthy of them. You may see all their portraits at our house in Auvergne; every one of them an "injured" beauty, but not one of them hanging her head. Not one of them had the bad taste to be jealous... These are great traditions, and it doesn't seem to me fair that a little American bourgeoise should come in and pretend to alter them, and should hang her photograph, with her obstinate little "air penche"
Author: Henry James

19. "I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits."
Author: Howard Hodgkin

20. "So, what do you photograph?"I swallow my wine."What?""You know – city scapes, nature, portraits, candid shots..."Boobs. I photograph boobs."Uhh... people?"
Author: Iris Blaire

21. "As they climbed it, the various Healers called out to them, diagnosing odd complaints and suggesting horrible remedies. Ron was seriously affronted when a medieval wizard called out that he clearly had a bad case of spattergroit."And what's that supposed to be?" he asked angrily, as the Healer pursued him through six more portraits, shoving the occupants out of the way." 'Tis a most grievous affliction of the skin, young master, that will leave you pockmarked and more gruesome even than you are now —""Watch who you're calling gruesome!" said Ron, his ears turning red."The only remedy is to take the liver of a toad, bind it tight about your throat, stand naked by the full moon in a barrel of eels' eyes —""I have not got spattergroit!""But the unsightly blemishes upon your visage, young master —""They're freckles!" said Ron furiously."
Author: J.K. Rowling

22. "Luna had decorated her bedroom ceiling with five beautifully painted faces: Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, and Neville. They were not moving as the portraits at Hogwarts moved, but there was a certain magic about them all the same: Harry thought they breathed. What appeared to be fine golden chains wove around the pictures, linking them together, but after examining them for a minute or so, Harry realized that the chains were actually one word, repeated a thousand times in golden ink: friends . . . friends . . . friends . . ."
Author: J.K. Rowling

23. "That wand's more trouble than it's worth," said Harry. "And quite honestly," he turned away from the painted portraits, thinking now only of the four-poster bed lying waiting for him in Gryffindor Tower, and wondering whether Kreacher might bring him a sandwich there, "I've had enough trouble for a lifetime."
Author: J.K. Rowling

24. "Michael used to draw self-portraits with nightmares hidden in his curls."
Author: Janet Fitch

25. "Rembrandt painted portraits, The Karate Kid painted fences, and I paint my toenails. But I'm not a snob, I still consider those other two guys to be artists."
Author: Jarod Kintz

26. "Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age."
Author: Jerry Saltz

27. "Up the stairs I found an imposing headquarters, decorated with the portraits and busts of solemn, whiskered old darlings who, no doubt, bled their customers with leeches and passed on the information to alarmed small boys that self-abuse leads to blindness."
Author: John Mortimer

28. "I was distracted suddenly from these pleasant thoughts by noticing that, like the eyes in certain portraits, Heather's nipples seemed to have the uncanny ability to follow you around the room. This is the kind of observation that once made, cannot be unmade. Unfortunately."
Author: Kate Atkinson

29. "Henry Miller, Genet, Sade, Bataille are really important writers for me and I love them, but I feel often they don't love me, you know? I feel I always have to wrap my head around the way the girl is treated in the works, and the way the woman writer has been treated within their philosophies. I think of Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School, where Janey Smith is in an S&M relationship with Jean Genet, who she follows around the deserts of Algeria, and he's horrible to her, and that's what I think of when I think of my relationship to those writers. I think you have to read the text, obviously, despite that. You seem to be subverting Sade and Bataille's ideas of the whore, and Henry Miller – all of his cunt portraits, all of his horrors that he writes about – you're writing about it from an interiority and a subjectivity that we don't typically get with the ‘whore' or the ‘slut' or the sexual girl."
Author: Kate Zambreno

30. "Unaware of Nina, the woman paused at the riverbank and looked out over the scar on the land where the water should run. Her expression sharpened, turned desperate as she reached down to touch the child in her arms. It was a look Nina had seen in woman all over the world, especially in times of war and destruction. A bone-deep fear for her child's future…Someday her portraits would show the world how strong and powerful women could be, as well as the personal cost of that strength…She heard Danny come up beside her. "Hey, you."She leaned against him, feeling food about her shots. "I just love how they are with their kids, even when the odds are impossible. The only time I cry is when I see their faces with their babies. Why is that, with all we've seen?""So it's mothers you follow. I thought it was warriors."
Author: Kristin Hannah

31. "A huge cloud of dust is not a beautiful thing to look at. Very few painters have done portraits of huge clouds of dust or included them in their landscapes or still lifes. Film directors rarely choose huge clouds of dust to play the lead roles in romantic comedies, and as far as my research has shown, a huge cloud of dust has never placed higher than twenty-fifth in a beauty pageant. Nevertheless, as the Baudelaire orphans stumbled around the cell, dropped each half of the battering ram and listening to the sound of crows flying in circles outside, they stared at the huge cloud of dust as if it were a thing of great beauty."
Author: Lemony Snicket

32. "I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth."
Author: Lewis H. Lapham

33. "If I was in love with someone, I would get their picture out of the school yearbook and do portraits. If I was curious about sex, I would draw pictures of it. There were no books for me to look at. Then I would go find my father's matches to burn the paper."
Author: Lynn Johnston

34. "Write something about me then,' he said when I came back. He grinned. 'Go on! Now! I bet you can!' 'I don't do portraits, Choe.' The lies liberated from this statement skittered off into infinity like images between two mirrors."
Author: M. John Harrison

35. "Gus the driver is everywhere and yet he appears nowhere, not in portraits or photographs, not even in the stories of men like Barthelme and Carver, who were all about guys with jobs and prospects like Gus's but who insisted on more sorrow, more angst, than Gus remotely manifests. If Gus weeps sometimes for no reason, if he stands despairing in the aisle of a Wal-Mart, it is not apparent in his daily demeanor..."
Author: Michael Cunningham

36. "Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?"
Author: Milan Kundera

37. "This pursuit of security in the past, this attempt to find a haven in a fixed dogma and an organizational hierarchy as substitutes for creative thought and praxis is bitter evidence of how little many revolutionaries are capable of ‘revolutionizing themselves and things,' much less of revolutionizing society as a whole. The deep-rooted conservatism of the People's Labor Party ‘revolutionaries' is almost painfully evident; the authoritarian leader and hierarchy replace the patriarch and the school bureaucracy; the discipline of the Movement replaces the discipline of bourgeois society; the authoritarian code of political obedience replaces the state; the credo of ‘proletarian morality' replaces the mores of puritanism and the work ethic. The old substance of exploitative society reappears in new forms, draped in a red flag, decorated by portraits of Mao (or Castro or Che) and adorned with the little ‘Red Book' and other sacred litanies."
Author: Murray Bookchin

38. "Large portraits of Mao on wooden boards several feet high stood at main street corners. Painted to make the old man look extremely youthful, healthy, and fat (a sign of well-being in China), these pictures provided a mocking contrast to the thin, pale-faced pedestrians walking listlessly below them. Pg. 193"
Author: Nien Cheng

39. "Before Summer RainSuddenly, from all the green around you,something-you don't know what-has disappeared;you feel it creeping closer to the window,in total silence. From the nearby woodyou hear the urgent whistling of a plover,reminding you of someone's Saint Jerome:so much solitude and passion comefrom that one voice, whose fierce request the downpourwill grant. The walls, with their ancient portraits, glideaway from us, cautiously, as thoughthey weren't supposed to hear what we are saying.And reflected on the faded tapestries now;the chill, uncertain sunlight of those longchildhood hours when you were so afraid"
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

40. "My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph."
Author: Richard Avedon

41. "I was going to have cosmetic surgery until I noticed that the doctor's office was full of portraits by Picasso."
Author: Rita Rudner

42. "People don't have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography."
Author: Robert Mapplethorpe

43. "I often concentrate on the eyes and lips, they are great indicators of mood and feeling, and I find that I can project character into my portraits by bringing the viewer's attention to these areas."
Author: Robert Ryan

44. "The suspect nature of these stories can be seen in the anecdote Jefferson told of Hamilton visiting his lodging in 1792 and inquiring about three portraits on the wall. "They are my trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced," Jefferson replied: "Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Locke." Hamilton supposedly replied, "The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Casar."
Author: Ron Chernow

45. "The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures."
Author: Salvador Dalí

46. "Great works of art in all cultures succeed in capturing within the constraints of their form both the pathos of anguish and a vision of its resolution. Take, for example, the languorous sentences of Proust or the haiku of Basho, the late quartets and sonatas of Beethoven, the tragicomic brushwork of Sengai or the daunting canvases of Rothko, the luminous self-portraits of Rembrandt and Hakuin. Such works achieve their resolution not through consoling or romantic images whereby anguish is transcended. They accept anguish without being overwhelmed by it. They reveal anguish as that which gives beauty its dignity and depth."
Author: Stephen Batchelor

47. "The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature."
Author: Thomas B. Macaulay

48. "Giving Back reframes portraits of philanthropy."
Author: Valaida Fullwood

49. "I am drawn to intimate, often uncomfortable portraits of a woman persevering and awakening."
Author: Vera Farmiga

50. "I always take a close look at those who lose themselves in self portraits. They are solitary souls, prone to introspection, who have really grappled with their existence."
Author: Young Ha Kim

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