Dawn Tripp > Quotes

“She writes only in pencil, as if the words might need to be revoked--borrowed words, for the most part, plucked out of other mouths...”
― Dawn Tripp, Game of Secrets

“I BOUGHT THIS house for the door. The house itself was a ruin, but I had to have that door. Over the years, I’ve painted it many times, all different ways: abstract, representational, blue, black, brown. I’ve painted it in the hot green of summer, in the dead of winter, clouds rushing past it, a lone yellow leaf drifting down. I painted the door open only once. Just before he died. In every picture after, it was closed.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“He'd dust the dirt off with his fingers, wash it in his mouth so it came lean off his tongue like a language.”
― Dawn Tripp, Game of Secrets

“I know that western sky. Sometimes when I'm alone painting, a blind lifts and I let my mind drift back. I remember walking out into the red sun in Canyon until the night fell. I'd lie down on the scorched hardness of the desert floor, looking up at the stars raining down like small silver bullets into me.

It was all I wanted then – to feel that roar of the infinite that exists within our finite selves. At times it seemed unbearable – that hunger I felt once – like the edges of my skin could not contain it.

I miss that.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“You don’t get time back. Any of it. You don’t get to make a different choice in a moment you think will be just another moment in a span of years you assume you have.”
― Dawn Tripp, Jackie

“A life is built of lies and magic, illusions bedded down with dreams. And in the end what haunts us most is the recollection of what we failed to see.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“I dip the very tip of my brush into the blue. I want to taste it. I want the thrill of color moving inside me again. The brush floats near the canvas. Where to start? Where to start? A stroke there, but the moment I’ve made it, it’s wrong.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“You have not been overtaught, and most of what you’ve been taught, you’ve rejected, and so the essence of what you are and how you feel comes through in your best work.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“art is exactly this: making what’s unseen but all around us, visible. Having that sort of faith.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“Who's in charge of a woman's life?,' I asked John Wyatt years ago when I was working at the paper and he'd made some remark about one of my columns. Once, I thought I understood what I was willing to give up when I married Jack: my work; the freedom to go where I wanted or see who I wanted, whenever I wanted. But the deeper sacrifice, I'd come to realize, is about power and the accommodations a woman is called on to make. To shrink enough, to be small enough to fit into the corners of a man's world. To file down her own edges to be the kind of wife he'll need, that he and others expect her to be.”
― Dawn Tripp, Jackie

“not only because of the pleasure it will bring, but because the power of ideas, and the ability to express them, is the greatest power we have.”
― Dawn Tripp, Jackie

“I’m not happy with the art I am doing. My forms feel too safe. They lack the bold force and freedom of my earlier things, and it strikes me that ever since his photographs of me were shown, my work has a different quality. As if I’ve been trying to undo the words he and the men trussed me up with. I remember how decisive it was—when I realized the danger of sending a free, abstract shape out into the world. If it had any mystery at all, they would only misinterpret it, sexualize, sensationalize it, reduce it to gendered terms.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“from that moment on art would become this for me—singular, indissoluble—the one thing that could rein in the chaos and fear to transmute an untenable world to some”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“from that moment on art would become this for me—singular, indissoluble—the one thing that could rein in the chaos and fear to transmute an untenable world to some form of beauty even as that world fell away.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“He did not give me greatness, but his faith in my early work gave me the space to achieve it.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“She was seeing something, though. You can see that in her eyes. They are not empty, not flat at all, but filled.”
― Dawn Tripp, Game of Secrets

“Georgia, come!” she cries, and I feel a surge of joy. The trees ring with her voice. The moment shatters, so beautiful and precious, the shed pieces of one moment giving way to the next, and I understand that this is where life dwells—in the unregistered time between moments when you are filled with no thought, no awareness, just a garden, ancient sunlight, your sister’s voice. I”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“It was all I wanted then—to feel that roar of the infinite that exists within our finite selves.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe