Frida Kahlo Quotes

“My mother says that pain is hidden in everyone you see. She says try to imagine it like big bunches of flowers that everyone is carrying around with them. Think of your pain like a big bunch of red roses, a beautiful thorn necklace. Everyone has one.”
― Francesca Lia Block, Witch Baby

“Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic.”
― Frida Kahlo

“They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages, and loved morphine and Demerol and tequila and pulque, women and men. I will shrug my illusion of shoulders and answer that I am a water woman, not a vessel, not something you can sail or charter. I am instead the tributary, the river, the fluid source, and the sea itself. I am all her rainy implications. And what do you, with your rusted compass, know of love?”
― Kate Braverman

“You too know that all my eyes see, all I touch with myself, from any distance, is Diego. The caress of fabrics, the color of colors, the wires, the nerves, the pencils, the leaves, the dust, the cells, the war and the sun, everything experienced in the minutes of the non-clocks and the non-calendars and the empty non-glances, is him.”
― Frida Kahlo, The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait

“I am what the water gave me, / a smoke-ring in a jar, / the braided rope / my ladder-to-the-light, / my shivering bird heart / caught”
― Pascale Petit, What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo

“Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all this. I think work is the best. (Frida Kahlo, p. 157)”
― Martha Zamora, The Letters of Frida Kahlo: Cartas Apasionadas

“The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb' (Andre Breton qtd. p. 55)”
― Christina Burrus, Frida Kahlo: Painting Her Own Reality

“Little deer, I've stuffed all the world's diseases inside you. / Your veins are thorns // and the good cells are lost in the deep dark woods / of your organs.”
― Pascale Petit, What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo

“leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. train your heart
like a dog. change the locks
even on the house he’s never
visited. you lucky, lucky girl.
you have an apartment
just your size. a bathtub
full of tea. a heart the size
of Arizona, but not nearly
so arid. don’t wish away
your cracked past, your
crooked toes, your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bought because the vendor
at the market was so compelling you just
had to have them. you had to have him.
and you did. and now you pull down
the bridge between your houses,
you make him call before
he visits, you take a lover
for granted, you take
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic. make
the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic. place it
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
don’t lose too much weight.
stupid girls are always trying
to disappear as revenge. and you
are not stupid. you loved a man
with more hands than a parade
of beggars, and here you stand. heart
like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.
heart leaking something so strong
they can smell it in the street.”
― Marty McConnell

“i paint flowers so they will not die”
― Frida Kahlo

“I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.”
― Frida Kahlo, The Diary of Frida Kahlo

“During one of these arguments, Diego picked up one of his paintings of the Mexican desert and shouted, "I don't want to go back to that!" He had spent fifteen years in Paris and the life of an expatriate suited him. It was easier to be a passionate Mexican nationalist when he wasn't living there”
― Malka Drucker, Frida Kahlo

“Ich habe immer gedacht, dass ich die seltsamste Person auf dieser Welt bin, aber später dachte ich, dass es viele solcher Leute auf der Welt gibt, es muss also jemanden wie mich geben, der sich auf gleiche Weise bizarr und beschädigt fühlt, so wie ich mich fühle. Ich stelle mir die Frau vor, und stelle mir vor, dass sie dort drüben auch an mich denkt. Also gut, ich hoffe, wenn du dort bist und dies liest, dass du weißt, dass es wahr ist, dass ich da bin und genauso seltsam bin wie du.”
― Frida Kahlo

“Frida Kahlo had found her passion in colour, she painted with intensity and she cherished her loves with every ounce of her bones. She stood up for things of importance, and she never ever apologised for who she was”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Me gusta tener amigos, pero pocos", reconoce, dando de paso su definición de la amistad: " La amistad es una alianza entre personas que tienen los mismos centros de interés. A veces sirve para algo, a veces para nada”
― Gérard de Cortanze

“Toma de la vida todo lo que te dé, sea lo que sea, siempre que te interese y te pueda dar cierto placer.”
― Diego Rivera

“Frida Kahlo was fucking fearless!”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Kahlo is pink mountains of shrimp in the marketplace
And barrio fiestas
Where exotic Tehuana women with flowers in their hair
Dance with rhythm and dignity
While their long rabona skirts
Billow out around them.
Lo que el agua me ha dado.
Kahlo is the colour of wild people and free thinkers
Frida Kahlo is the colour of legends”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Kahlo is Mezcal with chilli
Dried citrus peels
Red pepper
Cedar
And cigar leaf.
Woody notes
And heat sneaking up fast.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“They start out with a few compliments, which I receive readily. Yes, I’ve whipped the digital archive into shape. Yes, I delivered on the K–5 Maya Angelou and Frida Kahlo biographies, wherein the sexual assault and bus accident were omitted per a Provo parents group who weren’t ready for their kids to see the blood women wade through to create art.”
― Raven Leilani, Luster

“Mais Frida ne se représente pas comme un personnage sacré, car elle constate son état avec une crudité toute profane. Au lieu de du plier le Ciel de la délivrer, elle regarde droit devant elle, comme pour se défier (ou défier son reflet dans le miroir) et contraindre le spectateur à affronter sa terrible situation sans flancher.”
― Hayden Herrera

“Nada es más valioso que la risa. Se requiere de fuerza para reír y abandonarse a uno, para ser ligera. La tragedia es lo más ridículo.”
― Frida Kahlo

“But now, inside the gallery, something happens to him. He finds his emotions gripped by the paintings, the huge, colorful canvases by Diego Rivera, the tiny, agonized self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, the woman Rivera loved. Fabien barely notices the crowds that cluster in front of the pictures.
He stops before a perfect little painting in which she has pictured her spine as a cracked column. There is something about the grief in her eyes that won't let him look away. That is suffering, he thinks. He thinks about how long he's been moping about Sandrine, and it makes him feel embarrassed, self-indulgent. Theirs, he suspects, was not an epic love story like Diego and Frida's.
He finds himself coming back again and again to stand in front of the same pictures, reading about the couple's life, the passion they shared for their art, for workers' rights, for each other. He feels an appetite growing within him for something bigger, better, more meaningful. He wants to live like these people. He has to make his writing better, to keep going. He has to.
He is filled with an urge to go home and write something that is fresh and new and has in it the honesty of these pictures. Most of all he just wants to write. But what?”
― Jojo Moyes, Paris for One

“They devoured books and pulld legendary stunts, like the time they set off a small bomb next to one of their teachers during class to protest his refusal to teach them about Marx.”
― Sarah Prager, Queer, There and Everywhere: 23 People Who Changed the World

“It's important not to insist that people try things against their will. The palate is for pleasure, not for obligations.”
― F. G. Haghenbeck

“Sufrí dos accidentes graves en la vida. El primero ocurrió cuando me atropelló un tranvía... El otro accidente es Diego”
― Gérard de Cortanze, Frida Kahlo: La belleza terrible

“La high society de aquí me cae muy gorda y siento un poco de rabia contra todos estos ricachones, pues he visto a miles de gentes en la más terrible miseria, sin comer y sin tener dónde dormir, ha sido lo que más me ha impresionado de aquí, es espantoso ver a los ricos haciendo de día y de noche parties, mientras se mueren de hambre miles y miles de gentes [...] Viven como en un enorme gallinero sucio y molesto. Las casas parecen hornos de pan y todo el confort del que hablan es un mito”
― Gérard de Cortanze, Frida Kahlo: La belleza terrible

“you take a lover
for granted, you take
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic”
― Marty McConnell

“Apesar de André Breton [...] lhe ter dito que ela era uma surrealiste, ela não abandonou o seu estilo para seguir os métodos daquela escola. [...] Bastante liberta, também, dos símbolos e da filosofia freudiana que obcecava os pintores oficiais surrealistas, o dela é uma espécie de surrealismo , que ela inventou. [...] Enquanto o surrealismo oficial se preocupa sobretudo com as informações dos sonhos, pesadelos e símbolos neuróticos, na variante de Madame Rivera predominam a inteligência e o humor.”
― Andrea Kettenmann, Frida Kahlo: 1907-1954 Pain and Passion