Robert Motherwell Quotes

Words build a bridge between the imaginations of writer and reader, creating something unique between them.

Music is supposed to create an associate level, wherein I and you and you and I can associate without any misunderstanding.

Sympathy relies on a common experience. If you're clumsy, you might have sympathy for others who tend to bump into things. Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand another person's feelings even if you've never experienced them yourself.

She looked down again and I was stymied. I sat. Oh, this was enough to make me love her, because I was right with her, understanding every second and longing to step in. I didn’t even need to know the specific that was troubling her, because to me her halting voice easily stood for the general woe that hangs in the air, even on life’s happiest days.

I think what I love most [about writing] is that feeling that you really nailed something. Sometimes with a line you feel that it really captured what it is that you had inside you and you got it out for a stranger to read, someone who may never love you or meet you, but he or she is going to get that experience from that line.

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.

Words can never fully say what we want them to say, for they fumble, stammer, and break the best porcelain. The best one can hope for is to find along the way someone to share the path, content to walk in silence, for the heart communes best when it does not try to speak.

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt.

The real actor - like any real artistj- has a direct line to the collective heart.

Afterwards, people come and say, "I felt like you said that just to me. What you said is something I'm going through right now," so you know that spiritual connection is going on.

The poet should touch our heart by showing his own

I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I'm doing . . . the emotional reaction is all that matters as long as there's some feeling of communication, it isn't necessary that it be understood.

I understand people's suffering, people's pain, more than you will every know yourself.

Look inside your heart, I'll look inside mine.

A poem is a window that hangs between two or more human beings who otherwise live in darkened rooms.

I try to find something that applies not to me only, but to others, but don't try to control it too much. Essentially it is about what moves us, teaches us about ourselves.

What do you mean, 'playing really creatively'? Can you give me an example?" "Hmm, let's see ... you send the music deep enough into your heart so that it makes your body undergo a kind of a physical shift, and simultaneously the listener's body also undergoes the same kind of physical shift. It's giving birth to that kind of shared state. Probably.

All of that loneliness and longing in my heart got transferred into the book Because of Winn-Dixie, I guess.

I like to believe that storytelling transcends age limitations.

Even if you're an observer of a story that you yourself made up, you're still very much connected to it. You love it and feel it, no less than somebody's who's writing from their direct 'I' or 'me.' I'm just so much more interesting in stories than confessions.

Sometimes when you hit send, you can imagine the message going straight into the person's heart. But other times, like this time, it feels like the words are merely falling into a well.

Music is like painting in sound. You take it into your inner heart and never lose it. It's eternally mysterious.

Music is just a word for something we love largely because it consists of things that words can't express. Likewise, the heart is just a word for something in us that music sometimes touches.

Words have to find a man's mind before they can touch his heart, and some men's minds are woefully small targets.

Songs have some kind of structure that connects with people's hearts.