Top 120 Georgia O'Keeffe Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

52. “In the evening I go up in the desert and spend hours watching the sun go down, just enjoying it, and every day I go out and watch it again. I draw some and there is a little painting and so the days go by.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

53. “All the earth colours of the painter’s palette are out there in the many miles of badlands...”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

54. “I know I can not paint a flower, I can not paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning but maybe in terms of paint colour I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

55. “Come quickly. You mustn’t miss the dawn. It will never be just like this again.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

56. “My first memory is of light – the brightness of light – light all around.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

57. “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

58. “The meaning of a word – to me – is not as exact as the meaning of a color. Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

59. “It seems to be my mission in life to wait on a dog.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

60. “The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

61. “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

62. “It is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

63. “I have a single track mind. I work on an idea for a long time. It’s like getting acquainted with a person, and I don’t get acquainted easily.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

64. “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.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

65. “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.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

66. “If one could only reproduce nature, and always with less beauty than the original, why paint at all?”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

67. “One works because I suppose it is the most interesting thing one knows to do. The days one works are the best days. On the other days one is hurrying through the other things one imagines one has to do to keep one’s life going...”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

68. “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

69. “It seems to me very important to the idea of democracy to the country and to the world eventually that all men and women stand equal under the sky.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

70. “Imagination makes you see all sorts of things.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

71. “Marks on paper are free – free speech – press – pictures all go together I suppose.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

72. “Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

73. “I find that I have painted my life – things happening in my life – without knowing.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

74. “It was all so far away – there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

75. “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.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

76. “I am trying with all my skill to do a painting that is all woman, as well as all of me.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

77. “When you get so that you can’t see, you come to it gradually. And if you didn’t come by it gradually, I guess you’d just kill yourself when you couldn’t see.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

78. “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.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

79. “As one chooses between the country and the human being, the country becomes much more wonderful.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

80. “War is killing the individual in it unless he has learned livingness – if he had it he wouldn’t be a good soldier.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

81. “I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions – no one seeing what they are.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

82. “You are one of my nicest thoughts.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

83. “A flower touches everyone’s heart.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

84. “I have lived on a razors edge. So what if you fall off. I’d rather be doing something I wanted to do. I’d walk it again.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

85. “I like an empty wall because I can imagine what I like on it.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

86. “One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

87. “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

88. “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.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

89. “I got half-a-dozen paintings from that shattered plate.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

90. “Whether the flower or the color is the focus I do not know. I do know the flower is painted large to convey my experience with the flower – and what is my experience if it is not the color?”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

91. “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.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

92. “I can’t live where I want to, I can’t go where I want to go, I can’t do what I want to, I can’t even say what I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

93. “I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at-not copy it.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

94. “We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

95. “Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

96. “Making your unknown known is the important thing – and keeping the unknown always beyond you – catching – crystalizing your simpler clearer vision of life – only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead – that you must always keep working to grasp...”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

97. “I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see – and I don’t.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

98. “I took back a barrel of bones to New York. They were my symbols of the desert, but nothing more. I haven’t seen enough to think of any other symbolism. The skulls were there and I could say something with them.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

99. “I’m glad I want everything in the world – good and bad – bitter and sweet – I want it all.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

100. “I realized that were I to paint flowers small, no one would look at them because I was unknown. So I thought I’ll make them big, like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they’ll have to look at them – and they did.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe