Daybook Quotes

“I notice that I have to pay careful attention in order to listen to others with an openness that allows them to be as they are, or as they think themselves to be. The shutters of my mind habitually flip open and click shut, and these little snaps form into patterns I arrange for myself. The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.”
― Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist

“The hallmark of a decision in line with one’s inner development is a feeling of having laid down a burden and picked up a more natural responsibility.”
― Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist

“...it occurred to me that I could use the energy I had been putting into endurance to change my life. Yet the concept of brunt, of accepting and enduring, still seems to me to have a kind of nobility. It is, perhaps, less intelligent, but there is a stubborn selfhood about it that is dear to me. It can be, quite literally, the only way to survive.”
― Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist

“This life, a gift of grace for an unknown reason, must be lived purely, because at death we return with its accruements to our source. Life is entrusted to us, does not belong to us, and has to be restored in honorable condition. We are responsible for this trust, and must live with this fact in mind.”
― Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist

“What could my work [as an artist] ever mean to this man? A kind touch of my hand in a moment of fear or pain would have been more in his service than the endeavour of my whole lifetime. This incontrovertible fact stuck in my craw for weeks … he remains in my mind, central to my thoughts about my life. And to my recognition of limitation. In the range of my character at any given moment, I have acted in the only way it seemed to be that I could have acted. This in no way means that I have done what was right; only what was possible for me … It takes kindness to forgive oneself for one’s life.”
― Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist

“Perhaps the human lesson is always submission. We have a choice: to rebel or to recognize our powerlessness while maintaining our faith.”
― Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist

“It is as if I had to take Sam back into the uterus to protect him, to reestablish the placental connection in order to nourish him through his crisis. Perhaps because of this primitive reaction, his recovery is marked by an increasing independence for both of us, a feeling of health and ease as if, in some mysterious way, he had accomplished his second birth, into adulthood, by means of this violent accident.”
― Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist

“The first birth is documented. A doctor stands by; physical facts are readily available; literature abounds in accounts of birth. Folk knowledge hammocks the pregnant woman; she sways in the gentle wind of attention.
Not so with the second birth into adulthood. That is a solitary business for the parent. The course of events is not documented--cannot be, as each child tears the connective tissue differently.”
― Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist

“By feeling their pain, I protected myself from my own.”
― Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist

“I refused, and still refuse, the inflated definition of artists as special people with special prerogatives and special excuses.”
― Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist