Elizabeth Neel famous quotes

I see my work as having a relationship to the visual world, not just some emotive residue of my feelings. It relates to something that exists, or might exist, rather than a transcendent mental state or something like that.
-- Elizabeth Neel

#Feelings #World #Might

I didn't think of being an artist until after I went away to boarding school. There were other things to be interested in. And it seemed like a nightmare.
-- Elizabeth Neel

#School #Artist #Thinking

The violence in New York feels really mundane and banal to me. Whereas in the privacy of one's own home, say, like the farm I grew up on in Vermont, the kinds of things that can happen seem much more extreme. Maybe because it's more personal. Or maybe because you block out the things that happen in the city. But it's like seeing things born, live, die, fall apart, and start over again, without any intermediary clean-up steps from some corporate organization.
-- Elizabeth Neel

#New York #Block #Fall

When you see something every day, it gets into your brain.
-- Elizabeth Neel

#Brain

I had studied history at Brown and didn't feel like doing anything with it. What does one do with a history degree besides become a historian? And the professors in school, it seemed like they were just writing books for other professors to comment on, and vice versa - it was the most self-referential, boring world you could ever imagine.
-- Elizabeth Neel

#Book #Writing #School

All I can say is that when I paint, I am looking at things that are in the world.
-- Elizabeth Neel

#World #Paint #I Can

When I eat, I always pick out the best parts in the middle and leave everything else on the side. It becomes a big sculptural mess, but there are nice compositional elements about how it all sits on the table.
-- Elizabeth Neel

#Nice #Elements #Tables

Even though I don't have any larger spiritual or ideological system, there is some logic in concert with a huge number of beautiful, disconcerting, screwed-up variables that results in a certain visual pleasure in violent things. Like a broken egg yolk can be the most violent thing I've seen all day, if I'm in the right mood. But also tons of trash in the woods or a burned-up trailer park can also come across as especially violent.
-- Elizabeth Neel

#Beautiful #Spiritual #Eggs

Sometimes you need to live with a painting for a while. Starting a painting can be easy, but finishing it... that's the skill of the painter, how you finally know when it's done.
-- Elizabeth Neel

#Finishing It #Skills #Needs

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

The Christian is not obedient unless he is doing all in his power to send the Gospel to the heathen world.

Perils as well as privileges attend the higher Christian life. The nearer we come to God, the thicker the hosts of darkness in heavenly places. Aggressive Christianity is the world's greatest need.

I'm the world's expert on sterotypes held by academics about athletes and held by athletes about academics. To me, both of them are caricatures.

Photographs are of course about their makers, and are to be read for what they disclose in that regard no less than for what they reveal of the world as their makers comprehend, invent, and describe it.

First Conjuration Addressed to Emperor Lucifer. Emperor Lucifer, Master and Prince of Rebellious Spirits, I adjure thee to leave thine abode, in what-ever quarter of the world it may be situated and come hither to communicate with me.

Let me tell you, though: being the smartest boy in the world wasn’t easy. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want this. On the contrary, it was a huge burden. First, there was the task of keeping my brain perfectly protected. My cerebral cortex was a national treasure, a masterpiece of the Sistine Chapel of brains. This was not something that could be treated frivolously. If I could have locked it in a safe, I would have. Instead, I became obsessed with brain damage.

Pay attention to where you are going because without meaning you might get nowhere.

I hope it will not be irreverent in me to say, that if it be probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me

Many persons who are not conversant with mathematical studies imagine that because the business of [Babbage’s Analytical Engine] is to give its results in numerical notation, the nature of its processes must consequently be arithmetical and numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and in fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly.