Life Drawing Quotes

“There are often two conversations going on in a marriage. The one that you’re having and the one you’re not.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“By forty, is there anyone who hasn’t had to recognize that happiness, as understood by youth, is illusory? That the best one can hope for is an absence of too many tragedies and that the road through the inevitable grief be, if not smooth, then steady?”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Life. It begins and begins and begins. An infinite number of times. It is all beginnings until the end comes. Sometimes we know it and sometimes we do not, but, at every moment, life begins again.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“I spent so much time thinking about regret. Regret and its accompanying conviction that there is a perfect, placid life, one's own alternate existence, pristine and simple, existing in a neighboring reality in which certain turns in the road were never set upon. And it isn't true. Any of it. I knew that. I had learned it. But it is an irresistible fantasy, if only because it implies we have some control over our fates.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“What part of life isn't peculiar? Seriously? At what point, really, do you stop and say, well, THIS is really strange? THIS part. Not THAT part. But THIS part.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Sometimes life demands things of you, that just the fact of being alive means for allowing for possibilities that may be far from what you'd planned or even hoped.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“I had confessed fully-with all the misguided passion of one who believes that she is cleansing herself and forgets that she may be staining the listener.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“La vita. Comincia e ricomincia, un'infinità di volte. Un inizio dopo l'altro, finchè non arriva la fine. A volte lo sappiamo, a volte no, ma la vita ricomicia in ogni istante”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“thought: maybe this is what a mother feels like at times. When she can’t help one of her children. When she has to just stand by and watch her daughter strike out on the softball field, watch her son fail at math despite whatever effort he may put in. This ache. This defining double bind of roaring, passionate protectiveness and its equal, weighty, leaden uselessness. And even the impatience with it all; and then the guilt about feeling impatient, about finding it a bit oppressive despite the immeasurable love. Maybe this is what mothering sometimes feels like, I thought.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“It is autumn, mid-October, and the greens of our first encounter with this land have dressed up in fancy costume, orange, scarlet, yellow, to welcome us. It is almost too much to take in, all the beauty.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“There are moments in a creative life when you understand why you do it. Those moments might last a few seconds or maybe, for some people, years. But whatever the actual time that passes, they still feel like a single moment. Fragile in the way a moment is, liable to be shattered by a breath, set apart from all the other passing time, distinct.
But then it changes. And what seemed unimaginably exhilarating gets bogged down, even when a project is going well. It is a gradual, inevitable sobering during which your right to be passive diminishes. What the ether has given you, now in fact belongs to you. And then it is work. Then it is hard.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“My mother's death...seemed so much the focal point of all personal history in our lives, it was as though time began for us when it stopped for her. Maybe this is what happens to everyone - not necessarily sudden deaths , but certain events that create distinct before and after lines, walls really, requiring a great effort to climb, discouraging doing so.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“....now and then the universe just insists on changing your life in ways that you didn't ask it to.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“It’s just … it’s just so terribly difficult to admit that someone doesn’t really love you. Not in the way you thought. Not in the way you’d hoped.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“When I’d confessed to him, I had confessed fully—with all the misguided passion of one who believes that she is cleansing herself and forgets that she may be staining the listener.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. —VICTOR HUGO”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“...the thought of *never again* felt like death.”
― robin black, Life Drawing

“The only thing you are allowed to take from an affair is wisdom. You can’t say you are glad you did it or had moments of joy, but you can say that you learned a lot from your mistakes.”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Mentre mi abbandonavo al sonno, la mia mente si riempì di frasi simili, di sciocchezze, arrendendosi alla natura insensata della vita”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Ed era stato così che mi ero resa conto di amarlo. Quando avevo smesso di sentirmi sconsolata ogni volta che il sole se ne andava per lasciare il posto alla notte”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Non eravamo una di quelle famiglie in cui ci si scambiano baci”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Sei un'osservatrice, e questo significa che hai già vinto mezza battaglia”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Più che altro, però, avevo avuto la sensazione di avere bisogno del cielo immenso e di quello spazio infinito per far sembrare le mie rivelazioni abbastanza piccole e sopportabili”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Faccio sembrare viva qualunque cosa, non qualunque persona”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Non puoi vedere un paesaggio se ci sei dentro, ma solo nel momento in cui ti allontani”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“La vita sembrava una cosa grande e preziosa in quelle soffici giornate di neve. C'era abbastanza spazio perchè le cose trascurabili apparissero come tali”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Una pittrice osserva. È questo che fa.
Tuttavia non sempre guarda nella direzione giusta”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Immagino che fosse uno scenario splendido, ma immaginare e ricordare non sono la stessa cosa”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“In realtà, sapevo bene che non era stata la solitudine a chiudere tanta parte della nostra storia. Era piuttosto quest'ultima ad avere prodotto quell'isolamento”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing

“Non era la prima volta che mi trovavo a vivere sotto un regime di argomenti vietati”
― Robin Black, Life Drawing