Leven en werk van M.C. Escher Quotes

“When the sea is calm, the landscape (seascape) seems simple and even monotonous, sometimes with a distant, sometimes with a close coastline, but usually with no land in sight at all. You feel 'free', not only free of care, but also free of the solidity of the earth's crust. It is a wonderful sensation, feeling the liquidity of the water under the ship. This salutary freedom is constantly present, on deck by day, in bed at nights. The movements of the ship vary from a gentle rocking to swinging and hurtling; you are never motionless while at sea. Then you start to observe and assimilate all these natural phenomena surrounding you: the infinite variety of the waves and the swell of the sea, and for the first time in ages you look again at the heavenly bodies, the sun, the moon and the stars, and you see the living creatures in and over the sea, the fish and the birds.”
― M.C. Escher, Leven en werk van M.C. Escher : het levensverhaal van de graficus : met een volledig geïllustreerde catalogus van zijn werk

“I want to find happiness in the tiniest of things - a minute moss plant, 2 cm across, on a rock - and I want to try to do what I've been wanting to do for so long, that is, to copy these infinitesimally small things as precisely as possible and to be aware of their size.”
― M.C. Escher, Leven en werk van M.C. Escher : het levensverhaal van de graficus : met een volledig geïllustreerde catalogus van zijn werk

“I should like to end this description of the stars with the Pleiades, which I once saw rising up out of the sea. When and where in Holland is the atmosphere ever so free from dust and mist that you can see the stars clearly right down to the horizon? One evening I saw a point of light appearing on the horizon, followed a moment later by another one. I thought they were the lights of a ship sailing by in the distance. But then a third light appeared, and a fourth, and finally there were seven altogether; it was then that I recognised the Pleiades, making for the heavens in full sail, like a ghost ship.”
― M.C. Escher, Leven en werk van M.C. Escher : het levensverhaal van de graficus : met een volledig geïllustreerde catalogus van zijn werk

“Sometimes, just before I fall asleep at night, I have a beautiful vision. In my imagination I see the earth floating like an enormous orange, stately and still, in the pure emptiness surrounding her. I see her slowly rotating, always lit up and warmed on one side by her mother, the sun. Ribbons and shreds of cloud float around her, and between these the seas and the multi-coloured continents, with their humid plains and snowy mountaintops, sparkle and shimmer. And I see the hot, yellow deserts and the frozen polar icecaps.
I am so far removed from the beautiful earth that the people scurrying around in their cities are of course no longer visible. Whether this is such a good thing as it seems to be at the time is open to question. But it is a fact that my vision is so beautiful, so restful and so full of peace that I usually fall asleep soon afterwards.
That is why this also seems to be the right moment to end my story, at least for today,”
― M.C. Escher, Leven en werk van M.C. Escher : het levensverhaal van de graficus : met een volledig geïllustreerde catalogus van zijn werk

“Baarn, 5 July 1964: 'On the train to Utrecht I was suddenly overwhelmed and enormously moved by a sky full of clouds at different levels. I experienced a sense of space and three-dimensionality such as I'd not experienced for a long time. It's possible to suddenly become aware of these things, even in an overpopulated country like Holland. Provided that you are looking up, you'll suddenly see that timeless and unbounded eternity. Do you think it silly, or can you imagine what I mean?”
― M.C. Escher, Leven en werk van M.C. Escher : het levensverhaal van de graficus : met een volledig geïllustreerde catalogus van zijn werk

“Coxeter also wrote a long mathematical explanation in his letter, which was beyond Escher's comprehension, as he remarked in a letter to George and Corrie.

Baarn, 28 May 1960: 'I had an enthusiastic letter from Coexter about my coloured fish, which I sent him. Three pages of explanation of what I actually did... It's a pity that I understand nothing, absolutely nothing of it...”
― M.C. Escher, Leven en werk van M.C. Escher : het levensverhaal van de graficus : met een volledig geïllustreerde catalogus van zijn werk