Still Life Quotes

“Myrna could spend happy hours browsing bookcases. She felt if she could just get a good look at a person’s bookcase and their grocery cart, she’d pretty much know who they were.”
― Louise Penny, Still Life

“I have you with me, and I'm terrified you'll disappear.”
― Jodi LaPalm, Still Life

“I'm not the same person I was before, and I am deathly afraid I will never be her again...”
― Jodi LaPalm, Still Life

“Because this painting has never been restored there is a heightened poignance to it somehow; it doesn’t have the feeling of unassailable permanence that paintings in museums do.

There is a small crack in the lower left, and a little of the priming between the wooden panel and the oil emulsions of paint has been bared. A bit of abrasion shows, at the rim of a bowl of berries, evidence of time’s power even over this—which, paradoxically, only seems to increase its poetry, its deep resonance. If you could see the notes of a cello, when the bow draws slowly and deeply across its strings, and those resonant reverberations which of all instruments’ are nearest to the sound of the human voice emerge—no, the wrong verb, they seem to come into being all at once, to surround us, suddenly, with presence—if that were made visible, that would be the poetry of Osias Beert.

But the still life resides in absolute silence.

Portraits often seem pregnant with speech, or as if their subjects have just finished saying something, or will soon speak the thoughts that inform their faces, the thoughts we’re invited to read. Landscapes are full of presences, visible or unseen; soon nymphs or a stag or a band of hikers will make themselves heard.

But no word will ever be spoken here, among the flowers and snails, the solid and dependable apples, this heap of rumpled books, this pewter plate on which a few opened oysters lie, giving up their silver.

These are resolutely still, immutable, poised for a forward movement that will never occur. The brink upon which still life rests is the brink of time, the edge of something about to happen. Everything that we know crosses this lip, over and over, like water over the edge of a fall, as what might happen does, as any of the endless variations of what might come true does so, and things fall into being, tumble through the progression of existing in time.

Painting creates silence. You could examine the objects themselves, the actors in a Dutch still life—this knobbed beaker, this pewter salver, this knife—and, lovely as all antique utilitarian objects are, they are not, would not be, poised on the edge these same things inhabit when they are represented.

These things exist—if indeed they are still around at all—in time. It is the act of painting them that makes them perennially poised, an emergent truth about to be articulated, a word waiting to be spoken. Single word that has been forming all these years in the light on the knife’s pearl handle, in the drops of moisture on nearly translucent grapes: At the end of time, will that word be said?”
― Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy

“He pulled me toward him, and all I could do was stand there with arms at my sides and head against his chest. Broken, I feared even the slightest movement would cause pieces of me to snap off and fall to the gritty pavement.”
― Jodi LaPalm, Still Life

“But these painters of fruit thought only of their own mortality, as though the beauty of their work would somehow soothe their fear of death. There they all were, hanging feckless and candid and meaningless, paintings of things, objects, the paintings themselves just things, objects, withering toward their own inevitable demise.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“... from the classically executed lifelike bouquets, tempting you to reach for the petals that fell on a three-dimensional tablecloth, to a new and disturbing style in which the colors seemed to blaze with such intensity they destroyed the old lines, the old solidity, to make a vision like those states which I'm nearest my delirium and flowers grow before my eyes and crackle like the flames of lamps.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Still life is boring. Never stand still! Jumping bean life!”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Boy Who Lost Fairyland

“But in a still life, there is no end to our looking, which has become allied with the gaze of the painter; we look in and in, to the world of things, in their ambiance of cool or warm light, in and in, as long as we can stand to look, as long as we take pleasure in looking.”
― Mark Doty

“Still life." What a lie. Life isn't still. Death is.”
― Jordan Weisman, Cathy's Key

“Buchstaben zu empfinden, sie nicht nur mit den Augen in Büchern zu lesen, - einen Dolmetsch in mir selbst aufzustellen, der mir übersetzt, was die Instinkte ohne Worte raunen, darin muß der Schlüssel liegen, sich mit dem eigenen Innern durch klare Sprache zu verständigen, begriff ich.”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

“I hoped that they'd had some respect for the stuff they were immortalizing.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“..wer am meisten genießt, betet am meisten.”
― Georg Büchner, Dantons Tod

“Kannst du verhindern, daß unsere Köpfe sich auf dem Boden des Korbes küssen?”
― Georg Büchner, Dantons Tod

“Bartholomeus went on, 'I wanted to show that these objects are sensitive, suffer at the coming of night, faint at the departure of the last rays, which, by the way, also live in this room; they suffer as much, they fight against the darkness. There you have it. It's the life of things, if you like. The French would call it a nature morte, a picture of inanimate objects. That is not what I'm trying to show. Flemish puts it better: a still life.”
― Georges Rodenbach, The Bells of Bruges

“А чем жёлтый дом хуже любого белого или красного дома? Сделай милость, хоть сейчас меня туда вези. Сделай милость.”
― Anton Chekhov, Ivanov

“Я ходил по парку, держась подальше от дома, и отыскивал белые грибы, которых в то лето было очень много, и ставил около них метки, чтобы потом подобрать их вместе с Женей.”
― Anton Chekhov, Дом с мезонином

“Изредка он посматривал на неё через книгу и думал: женишься по страстной любви или совсем без любви - не всё ли равно?”
― Anton Chekhov, Three Years

“Только одна из них, одетая Аидой, искоса взглянула на него, чему-то улыбнулась и проговорила, зевая:
— Брюнет пришел...”
― Anton Chekhov, A Nervous Breakdown

“Она читала, далеко отставив от себя книгу: упавшая на стол рука казалась неживой.”
― Isaac Babel, Конармия

“Diana Carmody is a self-taught artist whose work explores the contradictions in nature and in the landscapes of the Outer Cape, where she makes her home. In still lifes and seascapes, Carmody forces the viewer to consider the spaces between the tranquility of sea and sky, the beauty of dunes and marsh grass, and the potent violence of wind and rain, thunder and lightning, the gallery's brochure about her said. In her work, nature is restless, motion is constant, the threat of danger implicit in the churn of the waves or darkening sky or an animal lurking at the border. Her work invites the viewer to consider her own expectations about safety and beauty. ("I don't know what it means, exactly," Diana confided to Michael, who'd replied, "It means they can charge five thousand dollars.")”
― Jennifer Weiner, That Summer

“...a flash of colour amid a shadowy, gloomy background made me stop, a riot of colour and texture that compelled me to face the gilded frame.

I'd never- never- seen anything like it.

It's just a still life, a part of me said. And it was: a green glass vase with an assortment of flowers drooping over its narrow top, blossoms and leaves of every shape and size and colour- roses, tulips, morning glory, goldenrod, maiden's lace, peonies...

The skill it must have taken to make them look so lifelike, to make them more than lifelike... Just a vase of flowers against a dark background- but more than that; the flowers seemed to be vibrant with their own light, as if in defiance of the shadows gathered around them. The mastery needed to make the glass vase hold that light, to bend the light with the water within, as if the vase did indeed have weight to it atop its stone pedestal... Remarkable.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses