Devotions

Supporting the inner life of artists and nurturing the soul is at the heart of this collection. These quotes, poems, writings, and reflections are gathered with compassion — a response to the emotional landscapes that shape creative work and the challenges of living an artist’s life. It will continue to evolve as I do — shaped by the questions I carry and alive in the rhythm of our shared humanity.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”

— James Baldwin, Life Magazine (1963)

"And what if one of the gods does wreck me out on the wine-dark sea? I have a heart that is inured to suffering and I shall steel it to endure that too. For in my day I have had many bitter and painful experiences in war and on the stormy seas. So let this new disaster come. It only makes one more."

— Homer, The Odyssey

"Something is a work of art when it has filled its role as therapy for the artist. I don't care about the audience. I'm not working for the audience. The audience is welcome to take what they can." 

—Louise Bourgeois

"I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in, but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain."

— Ada Limón, Calling Things What They Are

“I am so tired of waiting. Aren’t you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind? Let us take a knife and cut the world in two—and see what worms are eating at the rind.”

— Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

"People. People. Endless noise. And I am so tired. And I would like to sleep under trees; red ones, blue ones, swirling passionate ones.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow."

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don't expect you to save the world I do think it's not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair and disrespect.”

— Nikki Giovanni

“If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.”

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

"As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation -- either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course."

— Martin Luther King Jr.

“I want to underline my own belief that art must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition to it—otherwise life would become impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

"And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore."

— Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year

“One doesn't need a lot to be able to live. The great thing is to be free in your work. Of course it's important to print or exhibit, but if that's not possible you are still left with the most important thing of all -- being able to work without asking anybody's permission.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky, Journal 1970-1986

"I don’t know how to save the world. I don’t have the answers or The Answer. I hold no secret knowledge as to how to fix the mistakes of generations past and present. I only know that without compassion and respect for all of Earth’s inhabitants, none of us will survive—nor will we deserve to."

— Leonard Peltier, Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance