Paula Modersohn-Becker

"I would like to go to Paris for a week. Fifty-six Cezannes are being shown there!"

"Isn't love thousandfold? Isn't it like the sun that shines on everything? Must love be stingy? Must love give everything to one person and take from the others.. .I don't know much about the two of yo…"

"Today I was on the Rue Laffette where the art dealers are. There is so much of interest to see here. You know the things that you call 'the artistic' in art. The French possess to a high degree this s…"

"I must learn how to express the gentle vibration of things, their roughened textures, their intricacies. I have to find an expression for that in my drawing, too, in the way I sketched my nudes here i…"

"I feel an inner relationship which leads from the antique tot the Gothic, especially from the early ancient art, and from the Gothic to my own feeling for form. A great simplicity of form is something…"

"I feel a burning desire to become grand in simplicity."

"Nature is supposed to become greater to me than people. It ought to speak louder from me. I should feel small in the face of nature's enormity. That is the way Mackensen thinks it should be. That is t…"

"I think I'm getting into the real mood and atmosphere of Worpswede now. What I used to call my Sunken Bell mood, the spell I was under when I first got here, was sweet, very sweet – but it was really …"