Portraits Quotes
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We came to the house, and it is an old house, full of great chimneys where wood is burnt on ancient dogs upon the hearth, and grim portraits (some of them with grim legends, too) lower distrustfully from the oaken panels of the walls.
Charles Dickens
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All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.
Erica Jong
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A remarkably revealing portrait.
Byron York
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I happened to take a photo, and there was my wife, my dog and my banjo, all in the same shot - and I thought, "Oh, that's like a family portrait right there."
Steve Martin
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For me, a good portrait shows the fragility and humility of the person, and at the same time a strength, a resting in themselves.
Wolfgang Tillmans
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I have several portraits of Jigoro Kano and a bust too, a very beautiful one.
Vladimir Putin
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When I draw my caricature self-portrait, I always do a huge smile.
Rolf Harris
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I feel certain that the largest part of all photographs ever taken or being taken or ever to be taken, is and will continue to be, portraits. This is not only true, it is also necessary. We are not solitary mammals, like the elephant, the whale and the ape. What is most profoundly felt between us, even if hidden, will reappear in our portraits of one another.
Ben Maddow
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The self-portrait is an act of objectifying the self and in that regard is a unique form of portraiture.
Burton Silverman
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The mirror is the tool of the one who wants to do a self-portrait. And if you want to make a photo you need a mirror.
Agnes Varda
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There are portraits and still-lifes
And the first, because 'human'
Does not excel the second
Charles Tomlinson
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I was hoping to do an impressionist painting, but I wanted a good likeness and I wanted to create a feeling of the lady as a person, as a human being rather than as a figurehead for the monarchy and a pomp-and-circumstance sort of formal portrait. I wanted more of a relaxed portrait.
Rolf Harris
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Alas, it is just a single image - an extended moment perhaps. Unlike a biography, a portrait cannot present the many differing moments that make up a personality.
Burton Silverman
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Why do these big old country houses always have family portraits in the dining room? Do you really want to eat with someone's gloomy great-grandfather looking down on you?
Elizabeth Jane Howard
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I was so lucky that I got to meet certain people. It came through Roddy McDowall, who had become a photographer and would do these portraits of celebrities. Then he would get another well-known person to write a thing. He photographed me when I was 15 or 16, and he got Jason Robards to write the thing because he was sort of my mentor. And Roddy would invite me to these dinner parties that were insane. Like, Elizabeth Taylor and Maureen O'Hara and people that were just crazy. I still can't really believe that I met them.
Winona Ryder
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Painting someone's portrait is, of course, an impossible task. What an absurd idea to try and distil a human being, the most complex organism on the planet, into flicks, washes, and blobs of paint on a two-dimensional surface.
David Cobley
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It is, indeed, only in old age that intellectual men attain their sublime expression, whilst portraits of them in their youth show only the first traces of it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Of the huge part of our generation who have used drugs, how many have told their parents, to this day, even though they are now successful professionals and parents and what have you? There's a need to come out of the closet and talk openly about drug use. As things stand, the only kind of use that is visible is either the dysfunctional drug use or the media portraits of it. So there's this incredibly skewed view of what drugs are about.
Ethan Nadelmann
