Drusilla Modjeska > Quotes

“When it comes to a subject like love and art, or daily life and the great work, there are no answers, no conclusions, only conversations, meditations -- and the shining work.”
― Drusilla Modjeska, Stravinsky's Lunch

“It's as if, from the vantage point of a verandah bed, that great expanse of sky rolls in over us from the very edge of existence.”
― Drusilla Modjeska, The Orchard

“...she lets us see, she lets us think, she lets us feel, that we can get to a position where we do not have to struggle, we do not have to choose, and that there are ways of being in the world that allow us, in the same breath, to live in our domestic ordinariness and still create.”
― Drusilla Modjeska

“But it took a long time, almost the entire writing of this book, to realise the insidious nature of the dichotomy on which the story of Stravinsky's lunch is based. For it not only buys into a way of thinking that would separate art from life, with art striding above and beyond, transcending the ordinary and humble, but it sets life against art, or art against life. For those of us who are not the sort of people who stride and command—and don't want to—it inevitably makes us pit one part of ourselves against another, as so much in the culture helps us do, so that we experience these hard emotions as oppositional, one against the other.”
― Drusilla Modjeska, Stravinsky's Lunch

“This, they say, is the condition of the woman as artist. Woman? Lover? Mother? Artist? The distinctions are false. A woman is all of these, and reduced to none. To be an artist is not a matter of surmounting, or refusing, or even of juggling, but of bringing the values and knowledge of heart and belly into the work, into the image, into the paint.”
― Drusilla Modjeska, Stravinsky's Lunch

“It is in he nature of love, and in the nature of art, to be complex, disturbing, taxing.”
― Drusilla Modjeska, Stravinsky's Lunch

“He certainly didn't understand the conflict a woman might experience juggling the call of the lover and the call of the easel. To say nothing of the call of the baby.”
― Drusilla Modjeska, Stravinsky's Lunch