„I thought I should make something – I felt it would be so easy – it would take form under my hands like magic.Then people would see!A strong naked arm – a tanned powerful neck a young woman rests her head on the arching chest.She closes her eyes and listens with open and quivering lips to the words he whispers into her long flowing hair.I should paint that image just as I saw it – but in the blue haze.Those two at that moment, no longer merely themselves, but simply a link in the chain binding generation to generation.People should understand the significance, the power of it. They should remove their hats like they do in church.There should be no more pictures of interiors, of people reading and women knitting.There would be pictures of real people who breathed, suffered, felt, loved.I felt impelled – it would be easy. The flesh would have volume – the colours would be alive.There was an interval. The music stopped. I was a little sad. I remembered how many times I had had similar thoughts – and that once I had finished the painting – they had simply shaken their heads and smiled.Once again I found myself out on the Boulevard des Italiens.“

— Edvard Munch

Tags:

„Maybe I should have killed four, five hundred people. Then I would have felt better. Then I would have felt like I really offered society something.“
— Charles Manson
„No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.“
— Edvard Munch
„I had reasoned dis out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have de oder; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when de time came for me to go, de Lord would let dem take me.“
— Harriet Tubman
„My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches [things] I had done…and I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world.“
— Anthony Burgess
„Should there be danger of such an event — should he be the cause of adding a single more trouble to her existence — why, I think I shall be justified in going to extremes! I wish you had sincerity enough to tell me whether Catherine would suffer greatly from his loss. The fear that she would restrains me: and there you see the distinction between our feelings. Had he been in my place, and I in his, though I hated him with a hatred that turned my life to gall, I never would have raised a hand against him.“
— Emily Brontë
„I returned to school [after the bus accident], but I felt very sore and had little strength. I took my paintings to Diego [Rivera], and he liked them a lot, most of all the self-portrait. But of the rest he told me that I was influenced by Doctor Atl [a Mexican painter and revolutionary] and by Montenegro, and that I should try to paint whatever I wanted without being influenced by anyone else. That impressed me a lot, and I began to paint that I believed in. Then the friendship and almost courtship with Diego began. I would go to see him paint in the afternoon, and afterwards he would take me home by bus or in a Fordcito – a little Ford that he had – and he would kiss me.“
— Frida Kahlo