Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored
Alice WalkerRead
At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the idea that individuals express their true selves through their art, free from societal expectations.
In this quote, Alice Walker shares her experience at Sarah Lawrence, where she observed that all the artists showcased their inherent talents without pretenses or superficiality. This environment allowed creativity to flourish as individuals embraced their identities, focusing on their art rather than conforming to external pressures like makeup or appearances. Walker highlights the purity and authenticity of artistic expression, suggesting that each person was already embodying their destined path as an artist.
Themes
ArtIdentityCreativitySelf-Expression
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a discussion about the importance of authenticity in art during a creative workshop.
More from Alice Walker
All quotes →June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.
Alice WalkerRead
On a spiritual level, it's as though with my sighted eye I see what's before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what's hidden. It's illuminated life more than darkened it.
Alice WalkerRead
I think 'The Color Purple' is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.
Alice WalkerRead
How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?
Alice WalkerRead
One white man on the platform in South Carolina asked us where we were going--we had got off the train to get some fresh air and to dust the grit and dust out of our clothes. When we said Africa he looked offended and tickled too. Niggers going to Africa, he said to his wife. Now I have seen everything.
Alice WalkerRead
Similar quotes
There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
Gustave FlaubertRead
I'm lucky enough to be able to make films and so I don't need a psychiatrist. I can sort out my fears and all those things with my work. That's an enormous privilege. That's the privilege of all artists, to be able to sort out their unhappiness and their neuroses in order to create something.
Michael HanekeRead
A lot of work and thinking goes into my DJing. I want the entire night to progress seamlessly and when I have to adapt the energy on the fly for the crowd on any given night, I can do so with harmonic mixes that I've practiced over and over again. I am far from the only DJ that does this and it's something I take pride in being able to do.
AviciiRead
We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort.
John UpdikeRead
When you grow up in the church, the only translation in that insular world that people understand is preaching. You're supposed to be a minister. So I was going down that path, and then I saw the Tonys.
Billy PorterRead
Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration… tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils
Francis BaconRead