I paint all day. First Becka Brotmann with her loose yellow hair and just a suggestion of dahlias in the background. Then I painted Anni Brotmann at … - Paula Modersohn-Becker

In my first year of marriage I have often wept and the tears fall often as they did in my childhood - in large drops. They occur when I hear music and when I see beautiful things which move me. In the last analysis, I live alone just as much as I did in my childhood. This aloneness makes me sometimes sad and sometimes happy. I believe it deepens one's life. One lives less according to outward appearances.. .One lives inwardly.

I feel an inner relationship which leads from the antique tot the Gothic, especially from the early ancient art, and from the Gothic to my own feeling for form. A great simplicity of form is something marvelous. As far back as I can remember, I have tried to put the simplicity of nature into the heads that I was painting or drawing. Now I have a real sense of being able to learn from the heads of ancient sculpture..

I have been depressed for days. Profoundly sad and solemn. I think the time is coming for struggle and uncertainty. It comes into every serious and beautiful life. I knew all along that it had to come. I've been expecting it. I am not afraid of it. I know it will mature and help me develop. But everything seems so serious and so hard, serious and sad to me. I walk through this huge city [Paris]. I look into a thousand thousand eyes. But I almost never find a soul there.. .And beneath it all flows the Styx [the Seine], deep and slow, knowing nothing of these brooks and wells of ours. I am sad. And all around me ate the heavy, pregnant, perfumed breezes of spring..