Source: If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
“A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.”
Source: Swing Time
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Zadie Smith 81
British writer 1975Related quotes

“I am not my own light unto myself.”
Dialogues on Metaphysics (1688) Dialogue III
Variant translation: I am not a light unto myself.

As quoted in Sophia, Living and Loving: Her Own Story (1979) by A. E. Hotchner, p. 76.
Context: I was blessed with a sense of my own destiny. I have never sold myself short. I have never judged myself by other people’s standards. I have always expected a great deal of myself, and if I fail, I fail myself. So failure or reversal does not bring out resentment in me because I cannot blame others for any misfortune that befalls me.

quote from a talk between Th. Rousseau and Alfred Sensier, 1850's; as cited in Barbizon days, Millet-Corot-Rousseau-Barye by Charles Sprague Smith, A. Wessels Company, New York, July 1902, p. 147
Alfred Sensier frequently visited the studio of Th. Rousseau (and Millet) and wrote later a book about both artists
1851 - 1867
Source: The King of Lies (2006), Ch. 10.

as quoted in Barbizon days, Millet-Corot-Rousseau-Barye by Charles Sprague Smith, A. Wessels Company, New York, July 1902, p. 141
Th. Roussseau took little part in the French art-discussions of the day between Classicists and Romanticists, in the 1830's
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