My sweet, I do not mean to upset you in writing this, but I want to tell you that within us, as within the nature of every person's soul there is an … - Arshile Gorky

I love Mougouch [Gorky's wife]. What about papa Cézanne.. .I like the wheat fields the plough the apricots those flirts of the sun. And bread above all. My lever is such with the purple.. .About 194 feet away from our house [In Armenia] on the road to the spring my father had a little garden with a few apple trees which had retired from giving fruit.. .This garden was identified as the 'Garden of Wish Fulfillment' and often I had seen my mother and other village women opening their bosoms and taking their soft and dependable breasts in their hands to rub them on the rocks. Above all this stood an enormous tree all bleached under the sun the rain the cold and deprived of leaves. This was the Holy Tree.. [quote in 1942]

[speaking about a Persian rug...] how modern their conception of space was! They understood it in the seventeenth century; we are only just beginning to re-understand it in the twentieth – see how they mesh the vines, the tendrils, the flowers with space and utilize these linked forms to create wholeness and radiance.

I like the heat the tenderness the edible the lusciousness the song of a single person the bathtub full of water to bathe myself beneath the water.. ..I like the wheat-fields the plough the apricots those flirts of the sun. But bread above all. (1942)