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Quotes by Emily Carr

Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul.
– Emily Carr
Bless... the two painting masters who first pointed out to me (raw young pupil that I was) that there was coming and going among trees, that there was sunlight in shadows.
– Emily Carr
Cedars are terribly sensitive to change of time and light - sometimes they are bluish cold-green, then they turn yellow warm-green - sometimes their boughs flop heavy and sometimes float, then they are fairy as ferns and then they droop, heavy as heartaches.
– Emily Carr
How badly I want that nameless thing! First there must be an idea, a feeling... Maybe it was an abstract idea that you've got to find a symbol for, or maybe it was a concrete form that you have to simplify or distort to meet your ends, but that starting point must pervade the whole.
– Emily Carr
I have been sent more ridiculous press notices. People are frequently comparing my work with Van Gogh... I do hope I do not get bloated and self-satisfied. When proud feelings come I step up over them to the realm of work, to the thing I want, the liveness of the thing itself.
– Emily Carr
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.
– Emily Carr
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.
– Emily Carr
I was not ready for abstraction. I clung to earth and her dear shapes, her density, her herbage, her juice. I wanted her volume, and I wanted to hear her throb.
– Emily Carr
If you're going to lick the icing off somebody else's cake you won't be nourished and it won't do you any good, - or you might find the cake had caraway seeds, and you hate them.
– Emily Carr
Indian Art broadened my seeing, loosened the formal tightness I had learned in England's schools. Its bigness and stark reality baffled my white man's understanding... I had been schooled to see outsides only, not struggle to pierce.
– Emily Carr
It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw, not because she is Canada but because she's something sublime that you were born into, some great rugged power that you are a part of.
– Emily Carr
Let the movement be slow and savour of solidity at the base and rise quivering to the tree tops and to the sky, always rising to meet it joyously and tremulously... the spirit must be... perpetually moving through, carrying on and inducing a thirst for more and a desire to rise.
– Emily Carr
Look at the earth crowded with growth, new and old bursting from their strong roots hidden in the silent, live ground, each seed according to its own kind... each one knowing what to do, each one demanding its own rights on the earth... So, artist, you too from the deeps of your soul... let your roots creep forth, gaining strength.
– Emily Carr
My mountain is dead. As soon as she has dried, I'll bury her under a decent layer of white paint. But I haven't done with the old lady; far from it!
– Emily Carr
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.
– Emily Carr
Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence.
– Emily Carr
The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion.
– Emily Carr
The memory of Cumshewa is of a great lonesomeness smothered in a blur of rain.
– Emily Carr
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.
– Emily Carr
The spirit must be felt so intensely that it has power to call others in passing, for it must pass, not stop in the pictures.
– Emily Carr
The sun enriched the old poles grandly... The mothers expressed all womanhood - the big wooden hands holding the child were so full of tenderness they had to be distorted enormously in order to contain it all. Womanhood was strong in Kitwancool.
– Emily Carr
There are no words, no paints to express all this, only a beautiful dumbness in the soul, life speaking to life.
– Emily Carr
There is a need to go deeper, to let myself go completely, to enter into the surroundings in the real fellowship of oneness, to lift above the outer shell, out into the depth and wideness where God is the recognized centre and everything is in time with everything, and the key-note is God.
– Emily Carr
There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness.
– Emily Carr
Trees love to toss and sway; they make such happy noises.
– Emily Carr
Twenty can't be expected to tolerate sixty in all things, and sixty gets bored stiff with twenty's eternal love affairs.
– Emily Carr
What do I want to express? The subject means little. The arrangement, the design, colour, shape, depth, light, space, mood, movement, balance, not one or all of these fills the bill. There is something additional, a breath that draws your breath into its breathing, a heartbeat that pounds on yours, a recognition of the oneness of all things.
– Emily Carr
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.
– Emily Carr
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.
– Emily Carr
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.
– Emily Carr
Life's an awfully lonesome affair. 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.
– Emily Carr