Anne Truitt Quotes

This life, a gift of grace for an unknown reason, must be lived purely, because at death we return with its accruements to our source. Life is entrusted to us, does not belong to us, and has to be restored in honorable condition. We are responsible for this trust, and must live with this fact in mind.

I have always been mystified by the speed with which people condemn one another. Feeling as righteous as Christ chastising the money-changers in the temple, they cast their fellows into the outer darkness of their disapproval. This seems to give them intense pleasure. Whenever I am tempted by this pleasure, I remember some impulse in myself that could have led me, granted certain circumstances, into the condemned position. This has caused me to distrust the part of myself that would relish self-righteousness.

...it occurred to me that I could use the energy I had been putting into endurance to change my life. Yet the concept of brunt, of accepting and enduring, still seems to me to have a kind of nobility. It is, perhaps, less intelligent, but there is a stubborn selfhood about it that is dear to me. It can be, quite literally, the only way to survive.

I am, and I am going to be, the kind of person I have trained myself to be. In a way that almost amounts to just retribution, I am stuck with the results of all my choices.

We tend to mix genders when we arrange ourselves around a table for meetings. A sort of accommodation is made by the men for the women: they make space for us. they are ever-so-slightly polite, we are ever-so-slightly grateful. When we stand up at the end of a meeting, we all give ourselves a metaphorical shake that is only partly the relief of having concluded our business: we are all released from the effort of fitting ourselves together.
When men speak in these meetings, women relax; when women speak, men grow tense. I have the impression that they never know what a woman is going to say, whereas they are reasonably sure what a man will address himself to and how he will do it. So are the women; for them, too, men tend to be predictable. Women listen to women with a different kind of attention, and part of it may be loyalty to our gender; we want all of us to do well, as if we have the esprit de corps of subalterns among generals.

What could my work [as an artist] ever mean to this man? A kind touch of my hand in a moment of fear or pain would have been more in his service than the endeavour of my whole lifetime. This incontrovertible fact stuck in my craw for weeks … he remains in my mind, central to my thoughts about my life. And to my recognition of limitation. In the range of my character at any given moment, I have acted in the only way it seemed to be that I could have acted. This in no way means that I have done what was right; only what was possible for me … It takes kindness to forgive oneself for one’s life.

The hallmark of a decision in line with one’s inner development is a feeling of having laid down a burden and picked up a more natural responsibility.

It is as if I had to take Sam back into the uterus to protect him, to reestablish the placental connection in order to nourish him through his crisis. Perhaps because of this primitive reaction, his recovery is marked by an increasing independence for both of us, a feeling of health and ease as if, in some mysterious way, he had accomplished his second birth, into adulthood, by means of this violent accident.

Unless we are very, very careful, we doom each other by holding onto images of one another based on preconceptions that are in turn based on indifference to what is other than ourselves. This indifference can be, in its extreme, a form of murder and seems to me a rather common phenomenon. We claim autonomy for ourselves and forget that in so doing we can fall into the tyranny of defining other people as we would like them to be. By focusing on what we choose to acknowledge in them, we impose an insidious control on them. I notice that I have to pay careful attention in order to listen to others with an openness that allows them to be as they are, or as they think themselves to be. The shutters of my mind habitually flip open and click shut, and these little snaps form into patterns I arrange for myself. The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.

The first birth is documented. A doctor stands by; physical facts are readily available; literature abounds in accounts of birth. Folk knowledge hammocks the pregnant woman; she sways in the gentle wind of attention.
Not so with the second birth into adulthood. That is a solitary business for the parent. The course of events is not documented — cannot be, as each child tears the connective tissue differently.

I notice that I have to pay careful attention in order to listen to others with an openness that allows them to be as they are, or as they think themselves to be. The shutters of my mind habitually flip open and click shut, and these little snaps form into patterns I arrange for myself. The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.

By feeling their pain, I protected myself from my own.

The hallmark of a decision in line with one’s character is ease and contentment, and an ample, even provision of natural energy.

I refused, and still refuse, the inflated definition of artists as special people with special prerogatives and special excuses.

vulnerability is a guardian of integrity