“Poetics is practice of engaging the world, in which one risks being transformed.”

— Mayra Rivera

“The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Clouds, water, ashes, wind: The world waits to be read, to be interpreted, reinterpreted, created, and recreated.”

— Sheila Nickerson

“A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”

— Maya Angelou

“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.” 

— Agnes de Mille

“The only way to get change is not through the courts or—heaven forbid—the politicians, but through a change of human consciousness and through a change of heart. Only through the arts—music, poetry, dance, painting, writing —can we really reach each other.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

“A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist; nor that alone, but also between himself and all whose minds receive this work of art.”

— Leo Tolstoy

“When you write, it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity.”

— Edwidge Danticat

I am always asking myself the question, What is it you are struggling for? What is that vital thing the woods contain, possess, that you want? Why do you go back and back to the woods unsatisfied, longing to express something that is there and not able to find it? This I know, I shall not find it until it comes out of my inner self…only by intense striving to get in touch, in tune with, the Infinite, shall I find that deep thing hidden there, and that will not be until my vision is clear enough to see, until I have learned and fully realize my relationship to the Infinite.

— Emily Carr

“Art helps our heart break open instead of close. All art holds the knowledge that we’re both living and dying at the same time. It can hold it. And thank God it can.”

— Marie Howe

“To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear
Can't know except in moments
Steadly growing, and in languages
That aren't always sound but other
Circles of motion.”

— Joy Harjo

“Bewilderness is the place where the mind wanders without certainties.” 

— Terry Tempest Williams

“It was necessary because she needed to do it. This is what made it necessary.” 

— Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“Thus in life as in music or painting, in the movement of becoming—the growth of the organism, the unfolding of the melody, the motion of the brush and its trace—points are not joined so much as swept aside and rendered indiscernible by the current as it flows through. Life is open-ended: its impulse is not to reach a terminus but to keep on going.”

— Tim Ingold

“A piece of art is never a finished work. It answers a question which has been asked, and asks a new question.” 

— Robert Engman

“The eye sees the world, and it sees what the world lacks in order to be a painting, and what the picture lacks in order to be itself, and, on the palette, the colors for which the picture is waiting; and it sees, once it is done, the picture that responds to all these lacks, and it sees the paintings of others, the other responses to other lacks.”

— Merleau Ponty

“I shall become, I shall become a collector of me. And put meat on my soul.”

— Sonia Sanchez

“There are roads out of the secret place within us which we must all move as we go to touch others.”

— Romare Bearden

“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

— Leonardo da Vinci