CORITA KENT

When someone drew a picture of Pope John wearing an Avis 'We try harder' button, those words no longer meant which car rental to patronize, and yet some of the overtones from its original meaning are there and make a contribution to the new situation.

Women's liberation is the liberation of the feminine in the man and the masculine in the woman.

Flowers grow out of dark moments.

In the eighteenth century, it was ladies and gentlemen and swings in a garden; today, it may be Campbell's soup cans or highway signs. There is no real difference. The artist still takes his everyday world and tries to make something out of it.

When art has changed, it's because the world was changing.

Love the moment and the energy of that moment will spread beyond all boundaries.

Someone remarked that the newspapers or the news magazines are the same as the psalms except that the names changed in the stories. Maybe you can't understand the psalms without understanding the newspaper and the other way around.

Words have life and must be cared for. If they are stolen for ugly uses or careless slang or false promotion work, they need to be brought back to their original meaning - back to their roots.

Life is a succession of moments, to live each one is to succeed.

You can enjoy the quality of the ad and not let them pressure you to buy what you don't really need. I have had fun taking back superlatives and just ordinary good words and phrases from ads and trying to restore some of their life to them.

Groceries became a revelation: the people coming out with bundles of food. It's all like a great ceremony, and the whole drudgery of shopping has become my inspiration.

A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the total universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it.

I am not brave enough to not pay my income tax and risk going to jail. But I can say rather freely what I want to say with my art.

Damn everything but the circus.

That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.

Take an exhibit, in the days when we saw the Pop art - Andy Warhol and all that - tomato soup cans, etc., and coming home, you saw everything like A. Warhol.

When you get past making labels for things, it is possible to combine and transform elements into new things. Look at things until their import, identity, name, use, and description have dissolved.

Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail. There’s only make.

To create is to relate. We trust in the artist in everybody to make his own connections, his own juxtapositions.

When you are not separate from the creative process, time ceases to exist. You might start to feel tired and suddenly realize that much time has passed. It isn't necessarily a happy time - and may be very difficult to start if it is a job or an obligation. But if' you start with all the concrete needs and proceed in a thorough way - the creative process will take over and you will forget whether it is work or play. Working in the here and now is one of the most uncontaminated ways to work.

In this speedy world of ours when facts are multiplying rapidly and giant rearrangements are happening all around us, it seems dangerous to be made nervous by the new - to want what we can never have, to want things not to be rearranged. It would be better to be able to take the leap, which is to be able not only to live with change and newness, but even to help make it.

A responsible person is one who responds.

To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self disciplined is to follow in a better way.

To understand is to stand under which is to look up to which is a good way to understand.

One of the things Jesus did was to step aside from the organized religion of his time because it had become corrupt and bogged down with rules. Rules became more important than feeding the hungry.