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Art is a moment. Art is being a reason. Art is coping with being alive for one more week.
My art is only an investment now, everyone who owns a piece of me hopes I’ll die, because nothing is more valuable at auction than an unfulfilled life.”
But if you don’t believe that boys’ souls can be connected across a great distance, you know nothing about them.
Being a parent is so strange, all our children’s pain belongs to us, but so does their joy.
“People worshipped his art. He was loved by millions of people. But there’s a difference between being loved and receiving love,”
He feels like telling her that the artist didn’t give her the painting because it was his inheritance, he gave it to her because he realized that she was the inheritance. Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.
“It was okay,” Louisa says, in the way you do if you have so many bruises and scars all over your body that eventually you can’t be bothered to think it might not be normal.
“I know what you meant. I’m just saying you’re wrong,” he says. That sets a new record for the kindest thing an adult has said to her.
You said you couldn’t understand how anyone could paint… laughter. That’s because it was Ali’s laugh he painted.”
Because adults like him don’t understand that adults have to be adults so that children can be children.
About… about one of her dad’s friends, and the soda that tasted funny, and how she woke up naked with the man on top of her.
“She said she believed in us, never that she loved us, because that meant more to her than love.”
“He used to say that art is coincidence. A beautiful painting is the sum total of a person, what has happened to them, blessings and curses alike. Coincidences.”
He believed in Heaven, that good people lived forever, just not that he was one of them.
Tyrants can’t be beaten, only destroyed, and no help was on its way.
“Bullies always have small hearts but good memories,”
“I could never have lived there on my own. I would have frozen to death in that apartment without his eyes on me.”
You’ll realize that you’ve always been able to speak a secret language, one that has no boundaries, because you have no nationality. Art is your homeland.”
It’s so easy to be a critic, any coward can do that. But art doesn’t need critics, art has enough enemies already. Art needs friends.”
The janitor looked at them and thought of his mother, because when she saw a beautiful painting she used to say that her heart leapt in her chest so that she could see her blouse move.
Great art is a small break from human despair, she explained to her son. It took him twenty years to understand what she meant.
“Sandberg once said that art should be without purpose, and irresistible. You have to paint like the birds sing.”
No one can explain why some fourteen-year-olds want to die.
Forget it! No one will understand! the voice in our heads hisses to us. Then it repeats the same lies that all broken children have to listen to: There’s something wrong with you! No one else feels the way you do! People can’t fly!
They never understood how special it is to be abnormal.
Other children prayed to God, but Ted prayed to the demons, because maybe God decided which people would die, but the demons in children’s heads decided which ones had the strength to live.
Adults never understand that for a child who uses drawing to escape from reality, being made to do it on command is unbearable.
He should have seen in the boy’s eyes that he couldn’t draw a box without first feeling like he was inside it.
It doesn’t take any strength at all to crush someone’s self-confidence if you know where to stomp.
Then she sits there with the baby in her arms, hardly daring to breathe, the way you do when someone has said the nicest thing one person can say to another: I trust you. I trust you so much that I trust you with the start of life.
And it’s easier to cope with sad endings if you’re holding a baby,”
“You’re an artist if you create something! You’re an artist if you don’t see the world the way it is, if you hate white walls! No one else decides what art is, no one can stop you loving whatever you like, the cynics and critics can have control of all the other crap on the planet… but they can’t decide how hard your heart beats! Become whatever you want, but don’t become one of them. Art is a fragile enough light as it is. It can be blown out by a single sigh. Art needs friends, with our bodies against the wind and our hands cupped around the flame, until it’s strong enough to burn brightly
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“I can’t paint the way the art teacher wants. I can’t paint things. There’s something wrong with my brain.” “That’s because you don’t paint things the way they look, you paint them the way they feel,” the janitor replied.
Christian hadn’t said thank you, hadn’t said he loved her, because of course he was far too smart for that. Instead he had grinned and said: “You happen to me, Mom. You’re my art.”
Art is nothing for people with armor, you need a thin skin, but someone like that isn’t only sensitive to beauty, but to everything.
You can’t love someone out of addiction, all the oceans are the tears of those who have tried. We’re not allowed to die for our children, the universe won’t let us, because then there wouldn’t be any mothers left.
