Quotes by Emily Carr

About Emily Carr:

Emily Carr was a Canadian artist and writer heavily inspired by the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. One of the first painters in Canada to adopt a Modernist and Post-Impressionist painting style, Carr did not receive widespread recognition for her work until late in her life. As she matured, the subject matter of her painting shifted from aboriginal themes to landscapes—forest scenes in particular. As a writer, Carr was one of the earliest chroniclers of life in British Columbia. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes her as a "Canadian icon".
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

Emily Carr

Life's an awfully lonesome affair. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

Emily Carr

I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.

Emily Carr

I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect. So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born.

Emily Carr

Twenty can't be expected to tolerate sixty in all things, and sixty gets bored stiff with twenty's eternal love affairs.

Emily Carr

Trees love to toss and sway; they make such happy noises.

Emily Carr

You always feel when you look it straight in the eye that you could have put more into it, could have let yourself go and dug harder.

Emily Carr

You will have to experiment and try things out for yourself and you will not be sure of what you are doing. That's all right, you are feeling your way into the thing.

Emily Carr

You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion.

Emily Carr

Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence.

Emily Carr

Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul.

Emily Carr

Oh, Spring! I want to go out and feel you and get inspiration. My old things seem dead. I want fresh contacts, more vital searching.

Emily Carr

There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness.

Emily Carr

It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw.

Emily Carr

The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion.

Emily Carr

The men resent a woman getting any honour in what they consider is essentially their field. Men painters mostly despise women painters. So I have decided to stop squirming, to throw any honour in with Canada and women.

Emily Carr

Author Bio

  • NameEmily Carr
  • DescriptionCanadian painter and writer
  • BornDecember 13, 1871
  • DiedMarch 2, 1945
  • CountryCanada
  • ProfessionPainter