Emily Carr

“Twenty can't be expected to tolerate sixty in all things, and sixty gets bored stiff with twenty's eternal love affairs.”

“You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion.”

“It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw.”

“Oh, Spring! I want to go out and feel you and get inspiration. My old things seem dead. I want fresh contacts, more vital searching.”

“You always feel when you look it straight in the eye that you could have put more into it, could have let yourself go and dug harder.”

“There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness.”

“You will have to experiment and try things out for yourself and you will not be sure of what you are doing. That's all right, you are feeling your way into the thing.”

“I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect. So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born.”

“You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.”

“Trees love to toss and sway; they make such happy noises.”

“Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence.”

“The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion.”

“Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul.”

“The men resent a woman getting any honour in what they consider is essentially their field. Men painters mostly despise women painters. So I have decided to stop squirming, to throw any honour in with Canada and women.”

“I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.”