Susan Vreeland Quotes

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Susan Vreeland

Profession : Author

Birth : January 20, 1946

It was only after I began to write fiction that I found a way to connect with painting.

Susan Vreeland

For a century, everyone assumed that the iconic Tiffany lamps were conceived and designed by that American master of stained glass. Not so! It was a woman!

Susan Vreeland

I write about art out of gratitude to painters for the joy and spiritual uplift they have given me. Painters interpret for us the visual glories of God and, in this way, bring us closer to Him.

Susan Vreeland

Archival and published history does not always record personal relationships of historical figures, so characters must be invented to allow the subject to reveal their interior realm through intimate interaction.

Susan Vreeland

Color has always been important to me, ever since my first deluxe box of Crayolas.

Susan Vreeland

When I learned that near Roussillon there were ochre quarries and mines from which was extracted the ore which produced pigments in all the warm hues of the color wheel, I had a substantial artistic link to this region beyond mere love.

Susan Vreeland

Art history looks at art works and the people who have created them.

Susan Vreeland

I made my personal discovery of Emily Carr while visiting Victoria in 1981 to write a travel article. Immediately, her strong colors attracted me; her spunk fascinated me. Her down-to-earth voice in her writing appealed to me as authentic and original.

Susan Vreeland

Whatever it is that can help to bring God close is something to be revered.

Susan Vreeland

There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.

Susan Vreeland

Landscape is more than flat land covered by floodwater, the seeping of peat bogs, a river of liquid pewter viewed from a sentry tower. It's an influence on what a person values, what she is willing to sacrifice or argue for.

Susan Vreeland

After one hundred days of confinement following a bone marrow transplant, I rejoiced in taking short walks to a nearby park as I was writing 'Girl in Hyacinth Blue.' The uncertainty of my survival made every blade of grass gorgeous in its green intensity, lifting itself up, doing its part to make the world beautiful.

Susan Vreeland

To feel the grace of God in a painting of the dear, quiet commonness of a domestic interior, or in a landscape, seascape, cityscape, trains us to feel the grace of God in the thing itself in situ.

Susan Vreeland

Coming out of the Louvre for the first time in 1971, dizzy with new love, I stood on Pont Neuf and made a pledge to myself that the art of this newly discovered world in the Old World would be my life companion.

Susan Vreeland

I ventured into fiction in 1988 with 'What Love Sees,' a biographical novel of a woman's unwavering determination to lead a full life despite blindness.

Susan Vreeland

Each time we enter imaginatively into the life of another, it's a small step upwards in the elevation of the human race.

Susan Vreeland

'Luncheon of the Boating Party,' owned by The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., has served Americans as a symbol of France and French culture, both of which I love, and is as evocative and triumphant an image as that other emissary of France, the Statue of Liberty.

Susan Vreeland

I suppose it's easier for most writers to create and vivify characters of their own gender.

Susan Vreeland

The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.

Susan Vreeland