If you could see what these flowers are. [Morandi's remark, circa 1917 - to the writer Raimondi from Bologna, indicating flowers in the corner of a r… - Giorgio Morandi

I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. Only we can know that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree..

Though aware of just how hard it will be to attain the distant goal I have glimpsed, I am sustained by the certainty that the path I am following is the right one. I repudiate nothing in my past.. .Consciousness has always guided me in my work and I am comforted by the knowledge that in all my endeavors, even in the moments of greatest uncertainty, my personality has always managed to come through.

If you only knew.. ..how much I want to work.. .I have some new ideas that I would like to try out. [a few days before Monrandi's death in 1964]