"I could always draw. You learn first to express yourself in certain parts of the body. And whether it was actually playing in dirt, making marks, circles, playing marbles — the aesthetic category became certain physical things. And in school, art was a reward. If you finished your work, you could go to the table, draw, make papier-mâché. As I grew, my mother would say, ‘Leave him alone. He has talent!’ It became multiforms: I could sing, could dance, did not play a musical instrument but could draw. Your actions are about the transformation of the whole of the human experience. It’s a visual communication, and it’s also emotional and ritual. It’s a form of being alive." Sam Gilliam interviewed in NYT

"It struck me then that perhaps the bareness and wrongness of the world was an illusion; that things might still be real, and right, and beautiful, even if I could not see them- that if I stood in the right place, and was lucky, this might somehow be revealed to me." Helen Macdonald

In her last interview before she died, published in January, she was asked what she had learned from nature, having dedicated her life to it. “Love,” she responded. “Nature has given me love.” From a NYT article about Adriana Hoffmann, Chilean botanist