Happy birthday, Frida Kahlo! Here are some quotes from the artist.

“I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.”

“Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”

“They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”

“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.”

“I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim.”

“A little while ago, not much more than a few days ago, I was a child who went about in a world of colors, of hard and tangible forms. Everything was mysterious and something was hidden, guessing what it was was a game for me.

If you knew how terrible it is to know suddenly, as if a bolt of lightning elucidated the earth. Now I live in a painful planet, transparent as ice, but it is as if I had learned everything at once in seconds. My friends, my companions became women slowly, I became old in instants and everything today is bland and lucid. I know that nothing lies behind. If there was something, I would see it…”

“I hope the exit is joyful and I hope never to return.”

John Madera

Website

John Madera's fiction may be found in Conjunctions, Opium Magazine, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His criticism may be found in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, John Madera lives in New York City, where he runs Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.