“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
Eudora Welty
Photo above Eudora Welty in the garden, weeding, in the 1940s. Photograph via Eudora Welty Foundation.
Eudora Alice Welty (1909 – 2001) was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist’s Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.
“Painting, art in general, enchants me. It is my life. What else matters? When you put all your soul into a work, all that is noble in you, you cannot fail to find a kindred soul who understands you, and you do not need a host of such spirits. Is not that all an artist should wish for?”
Camille Pissarro
Camille Pissarro (1831 – 1903)
The Garden in Pontoise, 1877
“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton (1862-1937)was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930.
Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s masterful portrait of desire and betrayal during the sumptuous Golden Age of Old New York, a time when society people “dreaded scandal more than disease.”
“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.”
― Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh, 1866
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
Trees in the Asylum Garden, 1889.
