Portraits Quotes - Page 17

• We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us

  Andre Gide

  Running, Risk, Firsts

  Andre Gide (2012). “Lafcadio's Adventures: A Novel”, p.226, Vintage

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• every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.

  Oscar Wilde

  Artist, Feelings, Canvas

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray : the 1890 and 1891 texts”, p.7, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• 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.

  Connie Willis

  Latin, Book, College

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• 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.

  J. K. Rowling

  Lying, Thinking, Waiting

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• Justice based purely on laws is about as accurate as a portrait created out of large low-resolution color pixels. If you stand back far enough it looks good. Come any closer and the glaring approximations overtake all semblance of the original. Justice should be viewable under the microscope, not from a telescope. And for that it needs to be based not on law but on truth.

  Vera Nazarian

  Color, Law, Justice

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• Have you ever found your heart's desire and then lost it? I had seen myself, a portrait of myself as a reader. My childhood: days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew, forbidden books read secretively late at night. Teenage years reading -trying to read- books I'd heard were important, Naked Lunch, and The Fountainhead, Ulysses and Women in Love... It was as though I had dreamt the perfect lover, who vanished as I woke, leaving me pining and surly.

  Audrey Niffenegger

  Teenage, Book, Reading

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• Such power!" Adelaida cried all at once, peering greedily at the portrait over her sister's shoulder. "Where? What power?" Lizaveta Prokofyevna asked sharply. "Such beauty has power," Adelaida said hotly. "You can overturn the world with such beauty.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  World, Said, Shoulders

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2012). “The Idiot (Vintage Classics)”, p.80, Vintage

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• Strider's bedroom "The only thing hanging on the wall that wasn't a weapon was the portrait just over the bed. No. Not true, he thought then. The portrait was a weapon, too. Of seduction. In it Strider was utterly naked and whisking through the cloads like an avenging angel. He was holding a teddy bear in one hand and a stream of pink ribbons in the other. Anya had given him the nearly life-size monstrasity as a joke. But the joke was on her. He loved the thing.

  Gena Showalter

  Wall, Angel, Hands

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• How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. "How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June… . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!

  Oscar Wilde

  Eye, June, Giving

  The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. 2 (1891)

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• 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.

  Young-Ha Kim

  Self, Soul, Looks

  Young-ha Kim (2007). “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself”, p.7, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Many times I see you as a portrait of torture.

  Ira Glass

  Torture

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• The selfie era offers a big opening: everybody can do it; nowadays even five-year-olds know how to take a nude self-portrait.

  Lucas Samaras

  Years, Self, Eras

  "Lucas Samaras: Father Of The Selfies". Interview with Michael Skafidas, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 7, 2014.

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• We all stood and gathered our backpacks and I looked at the floor around my chair to make sure I hadn’t dropped anything. I was terrified of unwittingly leaving behind a scrap of paper on which were written all my private desires and humiliations. The fact that no such scrap of paper existed, that I did not even keep a diary or write letters except bland, earnest, falsely cheerful ones to my family (We lost to St. Francis in soccer, but I think we’ll win our game this Saturday; we are working on self-portraits in art class, and the hardest part for me is the nose) never decreased my fear.

  Curtis Sittenfeld

  Soccer, Art, Writing

  Curtis Sittenfeld (2005). “Prep: a novel”

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• at last you, will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane; certain corners of rooms, portraits of great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade; your deserts; your private dinosaurs; the first woman) all i need to know: tell me everything just as it was from the beginning.

  Margaret Atwood

  Ocean, Grandmother, Garden

  Margaret Atwood (1987). “Selected Poems: 1965-1975”, p.39, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• If the face appears, the picture is inevitably a portrait and the expression of the face will dictate the viewer's response to the body.

  Charis Wilson

  Expression, Body, Faces

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• She stood looking carefully at the labeled portraits Ursala had put up: Little Crow, Chief of the Santees, Geronimo, last of the Apaches, and Ursala's favorite, Big Foot, dying in the snow at Wounded Knee. "Isn't that where the massacre was?" asked Ellen. "Yes. I'm going to go there when I'm grown up. To Wounded Knee." "That seems sensible," said Ellen.

  Eva Ibbotson

  Feet, Snow, Crow

  Eva Ibbotson (2008). “A Song for Summer”, p.22, Pan Macmillan

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• Jeanne, I fell asleep among the paintings, where I could sit for many days worshipping your portrait. I fell in love with your portrait, Jeanne, because it will never change. I have such a fear of seeing you grow old, Jeanne, I fell in love with an unchanging you that will never be taken away from me. I was wishing you would die, so that no one could take you away from me, and I would love the painting of you as you would look eternally.

  Anais Nin

  Taken, Wish, Looks

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• I felt that the beach portraits were all self-portraits. That moment of unease, that attempt to find a pose, it was all about me.

  Rineke Dijkstra

  Beach, Self, Moments

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• I feel certain that the largest part of all photographs ever taken or being taken or ever to be taken, is and will continue to be, portraits. This is not only true, it is also necessary. We are not solitary mammals, like the elephant, the whale and the ape. What is most profoundly felt between us, even if hidden, will reappear in our portraits of one another.

  Ben Maddow

  Taken, Whales, Elephants

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• Life The machine The human soul A 75mm breech My portrait

  Blaise Cendrars

  Soul, Machines, Humans

  Blaise Cendrars (1966). “Selected writings”

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• When he takes the knife to the canvass the servants find him lying dead with a knife through is heart and "withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage." and the portrait "in all the wonders of his exquisite youth and beauty." p 349

  Oscar Wilde

  Lying, Heart, Knives

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• A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the great thinker.

  Anne Fadiman

  Daughter, Baby, Philosophy

  Anne Fadiman (2011). “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader”, p.41, Macmillan

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• I had not seen "Pride and Prejudice," till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Country, Flower, Book

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• In the business of portrait photography, one must combine the artist and the craftsman.

  Louis Fabian Bachrach, Jr.

  Photography, Artist, Craftsman

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• Scott Medlock's portrait of 'the shot heard around the world' from the 1935 Masters is still being celebrated as a moment in Golf History. Imagine that!

  Gene Sarazen

  Golf, World, Imagine

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