Heather Rose > Quotes

“Art will wake you up. Art will break your heart. There will be glorious days. If you want eternity, you must be fearless.”
― Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love

“Art creates a certain familiarity with loneliness. And possibly with pain. Physical, mental, it doesn’t really matter. It’s all a catalyst. I don’t like to admit that because it’s depressing, but in truth pain is the stone that art sharpens itself on time after time.”
― Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love

“Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one. Stella Adler”
― Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love

“I'd open the door in the morning and the slightly sweet smell of second hand books would greet me. For years I wondered just what that smell was. In the end I decided it was the smell of human thought embedded in paper.”
― Heather Rose, White Heart

“The woman in red was surrounded by the crowd and she was alone. It was utterly public but intensely private.”
― Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love

“There ought to be a name for the kind of overwhelm that happens when you realise there are too many things to fight. If it’s not environment, then it’s human rights. If it’s not human rights, it’s women’s rights. Law and order. Gun control. Invasive species. Water pollution. Tax reform. Refugee policy. Education. Health care. The list is endless.”
― Heather Rose, Bruny

“What sort of brainwashing, he had wondered, had created a world in which people worked fifty or sixty hours a week, every week, no matter how beautiful the day outside, no matter what thoughts they were having? Where would the paintings come from? The novels and sculptures? The music?”
― Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love

“Even after all this time, the sun never says, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole world.”
― Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love

“You would be amazed how rare it is for artists to feel moments of true satisfaction. When they’re inside their craft, inside colour or movement or sound, words or clay or pictures or dance, when they submit to the art, that is when they know two things—the void that is life and the pull that is death. The grand and the hollow. The best reflects that. To be such harbingers of truth is not without its cost. It’s no easy task to balance a sense of irrelevance with the longing for glory, the abyss with the applause. Artists run their fingers over the fabric of eternity.”
― Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love

“Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.”
― Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are. E.E. Cummings”
― Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love

“Grief is a pilgrimage, a long song, a poem that is never quite finished.”
― Heather Rose, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here

“I wanted to be free of today. As if in the telling, there would be a cure.”
― Heather Rose, The Butterfly Man

“Every hour of the day an artist falls to earth and we fall beside them. I fell a long time ago with Arky Levin. But I fell before that beside Marina Abramović.”
― Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love

“Nothing is solved. We go on and the scar tissue gets a little more pliable. It will never not be sad. It will never not hurt. It will go on being at the heart of my mother, my father, my brother, my sister and me. We are five of the millions and millions of people who walk this world carrying our grief in a knotted scarf and hoping it will not come undone.”
― Heather Rose, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here

“Physicists now know that 70 per cent of the known universe is dark energy. Dark matter is another 25 per cent. Once we thought we knew all about life, but it turns out everything we think of as reality is less than 5 per cent.”
― Heather Rose, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here

“it feels as if this big tree must have a direct connection to whoever is in charge.”
― Heather Rose, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here

“Distant shareholders have no understanding of the damage caused by their investments.”
― Heather Rose, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here

“Only missed being a jumper, or dying in the collapse, by five minutes. That ash on me, later I thought about it. That was people. Probably people I knew.”
― Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love

“The morning sun is spilling into the penthouse. Rigby, a gray rug of cat, lies sprawled on her back on the sofa with her paws stretched high above her head.”
― Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love

“You would be amazed how rare it is for artists to feel moments of true satisfaction. When they’re inside their craft, inside color or movement or sound, words or clay or pictures or dance, when they submit to the art, that is when they know two things—the void that is life and the pull that is death. The grand and the hollow. The best reflects that. To be such harbingers of truth is not without its cost. It’s no easy task to balance a sense of irrelevance with the longing for glory, the abyss with the applause. Artists run their fingers over the fabric of eternity.”
― Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love

“There is choice. We can suffer or make miracles.”
― Heather Rose, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here

“Perhaps spirituality is another word for curiosity.”
― Heather Rose, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here

“What she didn't know, what she took for granted about living with Karl and being a wife, was far larger than the things she could name.”
― Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love

“Parenting is a long lesson in letting go.”
― Heather Rose, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here

“If two people were holding on to a rock face and one of them lost faith, wasn’t it up to the other person to tell them everything was going to be alright? Maybe Lydia was on a rock face in the Hamptons. She had told him to climb the rope. Climb, Arky, climb! She wanted him to save himself. And he had. He had climbed up. But she was still down there. Maybe she was waiting for him. Maybe she was waiting for him to come back and haul her up. Or at least be there to say goodbye when she fell. Maybe she’d been holding on all this time, wondering when he’d put his head over the cliff and say, ‘I’m here. I’m back with help.”
― Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love

“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful. MARY SHELLEY”
― Heather Rose, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here

“There is an intelligence at work in my body. I am in awe. I had, until then, been pretty certain my brain ran everything. Not so, said the wise labouring body. Not so.”
― Heather Rose, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here

“God-given right to live as they pleased.”
― Heather Rose, Bruny

“The Franklin didn’t only belong to Tasmanians. Nor our forests. They belonged to the world. We were custodians.”
― Heather Rose, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here