Emily Carr Quotes

“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

“Indians do not hinder the progress of their dead by embalming or tight coffining. When the spirit has gone they give the body back to the earth. the earth welcomes the body-coaxes new life and beauty from it, hurries over what men shudder at. Lovely tender herbage bursts from the graves, swiftly, exulting over corruption.”

— 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

“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

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

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

— Emily Carr

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

— 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

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

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

“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

“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 depths of your soul ... let your roots creep forth, gaining strength.”

— Emily Carr

“Art is art, nature is nature, you cannot improve upon it ... Pictures should be inspired by nature, but made in the soul of the artist. It is the soul of the individual that counts.”

— Emily Carr

“Enter into the life of the trees. Know your relationship and understand their language, unspoken, unwritten talk. Answer back to them with their own dumb magnificence, soul words, earth words, the God in you responding to the God in them.”

— Emily Carr

“There is no right and wrong way to paint except honestly or dishonestly. Honestly is trying for the bigger thing. Dishonestly is bluffing and getting through a smattering of surface representation with no meaning ...”

— Emily Carr

“Let me not fuss and fret at my incompetence but be still and know that Thou art God.”

— Emily Carr

“Do not try to do extraordinary things but do ordinary things with intensity.”

— Emily Carr

“Up came the sun, and drank the dew.”

— Emily Carr

As the woods are the same, the trees standing in their places, the rocks and the earth ... they are always different too, as lights and shadows and seasons and moods pass through them.

— Emily Carr

Oh, the glory of growth, silent, mighty, persistent, inevitable! To awaken, to open up like a flower to the light of a fuller consciousness!

— Emily Carr

Art is an aspect of God and there is only one God, but different people see Him in different ways. Though He is always the same He doesn't always look the same ...

— 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

“The house begins to be a home. The unfamiliar places are beginning to fold the familiar objects into their keeping and to cozy them down. Objects that swore at each other when the movers heaved them into the new rooms have subsided into corners and sit to lick their feet and wash their faces like cats accepting a new home.”

— Emily Carr

“Inspiration is intention obeyed.”

— 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

Go out there into the glory of the woods. See God in every particle of them expressing glory and strength and power, tenderness and protection. Know that they are God expressing God made manifest.

— Emily Carr

“Last night I dreamed that I came face to face with a picture I had done and forgotten, a forest done in simple movement, just forms of trees moving in space. That is the third time I have seen pictures in my dreams, a glint of what I am striving to attain.”

— 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

“Writing is a strong easement for perplexity. My life is a map, spread out with all the rivers and hills showing.”

— Emily Carr

“Don't take what someone else has made sure of and pretend it's you yourself that have made sure of it till it's yours absolutely by conviction. It's stealing to take it and hypocrisy and you'll fall into a hole.”

— Emily Carr

Oh, I wonder if I will ever feel the burst of birth-joy, that knowing that the indescribable, joyous thing that has wooed and wond me has passed through my life and produced one atom of the great reality.

— Emily Carr

“It's all the unwordable things one wants to write about, just as it's all the unformable things one wants to paint - essence.”

— Emily Carr

“Over and over one must ask oneself the queston, 'What do I want to express? What is the thought behind the saying? What is my ideal, what my objective? What? Why? Why? What?”

— Emily Carr

The memory of Cumshewa is of a great lonesomeness smothered in a blur of rain.

— Emily Carr

“Bless ... the two painting masters who first pointed out to me that there was coming and going among trees, that there was sunlight in shadows.”

— Emily Carr

Oh I do want that thing, that oneness of movement that will catch the thing up into one movement and sing - harmony of life.

— 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

I thought my mountain was coming this morning. It was near to speaking when suddenly it shifted, sulked, and returned to smallness. It has eluded me again and sits there, puny and dull. Why?

— Emily Carr

“I wonder why we are always sort of ashamed of our best parts and try to hide them. We don't mind ridicule of our 'sillinesses' but of our 'sobers' ...”

— Emily Carr

“The foolish square calves pretend to be frightened of our train. Bluffers! Haven't they seen it every day since they were born? It's just an excuse to shake the joy out of their heels.”

— Emily Carr

“I made myself into an envelope into which I could thrust my work deep, lick the flap, seal it from everybody.”

— Emily Carr

I can rise above the humility of my failure with an intense desire to search deeper and a blind faith that some day my sight may pierce through the veils that hide. I know God's face is there if I keep my gaze steady enough.

— Emily Carr

“Art being so much greater than ourselves, it will not give up once it has taken hold.”

— Emily Carr

“Sometimes I could quit paint and take to charring. It must be fine to clean perfectly, to shine and polish and know that it could not be done better. In painting that never occurs.”

— 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

“Trying to find equivalents for things in words helps me find equivalents in painting.”

— Emily Carr

“The outstanding event was the doing which I am still at. Don't pickle me awayas done.”

— Emily Carr

“There is a side of friendship that develops better and stronger by correspondence than contact ... The absence of the flesh in writing perhaps brings souls nearer.”

— Emily Carr

The liveness in me just loves to feel the liveness in growing things, in grass and rain and leaves and flowers and sun and feathers and furs and earth and sand and moss.

— Emily Carr