My painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me.
I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.
God told me if I painted that mountain enough, I could have it.
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.
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.
Anyone with any degree of mental toughness ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least.
When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me-some of them more than sixty years ago-I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives. If the person in the photographs were living in this world today, she would be quite a different person-but it doesn’t matter-Stieglitz photographed her then.
I wish so much to go that I almost wish I had never been there.
It is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.
The skulls were there and I could say something with them. To me they are as beautiful as anything I know. To me they are strangely more living than the animals walking around – hair, eyes and all, with the tails switching. The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable – and knows no kindness with all its beauty.
I’m getting to like you so tremendously that it sometimes scares me.
I seem to be hunting for something of myself out there – something in myself that will give me a symbol for all this – a symbol for the sense of life I get out here –.
Come quickly. You mustn’t miss the dawn. It will never be just like this again.
I am divided between my man and a life with him – and some thing of the outdoors – of your world – that is in my blood – and that I know I will never get rid of – I have to get along with my divided self the best way I can –.
To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
Frieda was very special,” O’Keeffe recalls. “I can remember very clearly the first time I ever saw her, standing in a doorway, with her hair all frizzed out, wearing a cheap red calico dress that looked as though she’d just wiped out the frying pan with it. She was not thin, and not young, but there was something radiant and wonderful about her.
My friend Doris Bry says now that I’ve ruined her spelling because I misspell with such confidence.
Living out here has just meant happiness. Sometimes I think I’m half-mad with love for this place.
As one chooses between the country and the human being, the country becomes much more wonderful.
I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.
To see takes time.