Mark Rothko Quotes

But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.

Story is the oldest, commonest, most beloved, and most effective form of communication because our life is essentially a story. That's why the Bible is the most realistic of religious books. We can easily ignore or argue away abstractions, but we bump up against concretely real people, things, and events in story, as in life.

My struggle has been to return painting to the tangible object, which is like returning the personality to touching and feeling the world around it, to offset the tendency to vagueness and abstraction. To remind people of practical activity, to suggest the sense and not to escape from the senses.

Know yourself and go in swinging, if it hurts when you hit, it might be real, too.

Any profound view of the world is mysticism. It has, of course, to deal with life and the world, both of which are nonrational entities.

Pain or love or danger makes you real again.

If I see a human body on the stage, I don't see it as an abstraction. I see it as a body.

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’

Real life is messy, inconsistent, and it's seldom when anything ever really gets resolved. It's taken me a long time to realize that.

It is interesting to observe how real the object remains, in spite of all abstractions.

That's how it will be, except that in reality, both today and later, one will stand there with a palpable body and a real head, a real forehead, that is, for smiting on with one's hand.

The real poetry and beauty in life comes from an intense relationship with reality in all its aspects. Realism is in fact the ideal we must aspire to, the highest point of human rationality.

What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.

A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.

Just because something is a metaphor doesn't mean it can't be real.

If things are real, they're there all the time.

The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be "like real life" in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.

Life is a straight drink - straight pleasure, straight pain, straightforward, one hundred percent.

...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me

Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?

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.

Women want to see the truth. They don't want to see some perfect girl.

The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from "Transcendental Etude

When you're kissing a woman and you want it to look realistic, you're thinking, 'Am I taking advantage of her? Is her boyfriend going to think I'm over-stepping the mark? Whereas when you are kissing a man, those thoughts don't cross your mind. I'm more scared of it looking false, so I went for it fully to make it look real and hopefully I've achieved that.

if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.