The Painter Quotes

“You rest now. Rest for longer than you are used to resting. Make a stillness around you, a field of peace. Your best work, the best time of your life will grow out of this peace.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“It is okay for people you love to leave. For them to come and go. She taught it to me over and over.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“Most of us are never seen, not clearly, and when we are we likely jump and run.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“The reason people are so moved by art and why artists tend to take it all so seriously is that if they are real and true they come to the painting with everything they know and feel and live, and all the things they don't know, and some of the things they hope, and they are honest about them all and put them on the canvas. What can be more serious?”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“we can proceed in our lives just as easily from love to love as from loss to loss. A good thing to remember in the middle of the night when you’re not sure how you will get through the next three breaths.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“One thing we are learning to be sure of: life does not get less strange.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“Because that's what it turned into: in front of a fine painting a viewer stopped looking and started watching, watching is more specific, watching is a hunt for something, a search, the way we search for a loved one's boat on the horizon, or an elk in the trees. Before a good painting they started watching for clues to their own life.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“What I realized standing there, is that this dark yearning is what happens when we idealize anything: the form of a woman, a landscape, a spiritual impulse. We move it closer to the realm of the dead, if not outright kill it. The living joyful exuberant woman becomes statue marble and dead, or pornographic and equally dead. The spiritual impulse becomes religion. And dead.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“So crows must spend a lot of the day wondering what they are supposed to do now, what they are here for, and that seemed like a cruel existential dilemma for anyone who didn’t have TV.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“Well, I think that’s sort of like Eve biting the apple. You were talking about Genesis. I think it’s like that, the crow is like the serpent. He is giving the horse the awareness of choice. And with a full knowledge of choice comes a foreknowledge of death.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“Tapas is a fancy way of saying a morsel of food for a fuckload of money, but I didn’t mind, I was feeling flush.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“the craggy gorge reminded me that we can proceed in our lives just as easily from love to love as from loss to loss. A good thing to remember in the middle of the night when you’re not sure how you will get through the next three breaths.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“Sometimes I think that’s all you need. A good man with a fishing tip, a wave. A woman once in a while. Some work to do that might mean something. A truck that runs, that some faceless bastard two hundred miles away can’t turn off. It’s not much, but plenty when you don’t have any of it.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“What it is about painting, how it can hit people exactly like music, and hit people so differently.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“I think there should be tribunals for social cruelty as there are for physical assault. Calculated cuts in the first degree. Snobicide or its reverse.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“It didn't get better, not in my book. I mean if you weren't looking too hard at what just happened or who might be down the road or at some other stuff. Maybe living well is the art of not looking at that, at the other stuff, when you don't have to. Or being okay with it.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“You lose yourself and just about vanish and the painting asserts and fills and flows over the dam and down into the streambed of everything you have ever experienced and thought, and carries you both on a current that takes you into a country that neither of you have ever seen. Where you have never been.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“I never thought I would be a painter. That I might make a world and walk into it and forget myself. That art would be something I would not have any way of not doing.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“The creek at night under the moon was just enough like the creek in daylight to be reassuring. There was the deadfall spruce that sieved the current with skeleton branches, churning a line of pale foam. There was the long pool above, a dark mirror of tree shadows and beacon moon. There were the gravel bars, chalky, shaped to the banks and swept into low moraines that divided the water. There the sky, softened as if by a thin fog of moonlight, filling the canyon. For a moment I forgot my preoccupation with the dark and drove up the road with that awe I felt before certain paintings in certain museums, the awe in which I disappeared.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“I went over to the painting and looked closely. It had changed in my absence, something paintings liked to do.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“Everything's fucked up, might as well meet it halfway and see what happens.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“life does not get less strange.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“Leads to an evolutionary loss of the vocal cords.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“Poor horse. It was leap and die or live and be haunted by the ability to choose. Which when I think about it, might be one definition of consciousness. I pitied just about everybody.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“present”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“The creature gazes into openness with all its eyes.… Free from death. We alone see that: the free creature has its progress always behind it, and God before it, and when it moves, it moves in eternity, as streams do. She”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“I flipped through the Duino Elegies”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity Or carry report. You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“about how crazy hard is the journey of getting to where you have never been.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“When you kill do you also conjoin somehow? In some horrible communion you will never shake? Is that why soldiers come home and scream at night and kill themselves? Because they have become their targets?”
― Peter Heller, The Painter