Frida Kahlo Quotations

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter. She was married to cubist painter Diego Rivera.

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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.
- Letter to Alejandro Gómez Arias, (1926-09-29

I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim.
- Letter to Ella Wolfe, "Wednesday 13," 1938, quoted in Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera (1983) ISBN 0-06-091127-1 , p.197. In a footnote (p.467), Herrera writes that Kahlo had heard this joke from her friend, the poet José Frías.

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.
- Quoted in Antonio Rodríguez, "Una pintora extraordinaria," Así (1945-03-17)

His [Diego Rivera's] supposed mythomania is in direct relation to his tremendous imagination. That is to say, he is as much of a liar as the poets or as the children who have not yet been turned into idiots by school or mothers. I have heard him tell all kinds of lies: from the most innocent, to the most complicated stories about people whom his imagination combined in a fantastic situation or actions, always with a great sense of humor and a marvelous critical sense; but I have never heard him say a single stupid or banal lie. Lying, or playing at lying, he unmasks many people, he learns the interior mechanism of others, who are much more ingenuously liars than he, and the most curious thing about the supposed lies of Diego, is that in the long and short of it, those who are involved in the imaginary combination become angry, not because of the lie, but because of the truth contained in the lie, that always comes to the surface.
- "Portrait of Diego" [Retrato de Diego] (1949-01-22), first published in Hoy (Mexico City) and posthumously (1955-07-17) in Novedades (Mexico City): "México en la Cultura"

I have suffered two grave accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar knocked me down... The other accident is Diego.
- Quoted in Gisèle Freund, "Imagen de Frida Kahlo," Novedades (Mexico City) (1951-06-10)

They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.
- Quoted in Time Magazine, "Mexican Autobiography" (1953-04-27)

I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.
- Quoted in Time Magazine, "Mexican Autobiography" (1953-04-27)

Pies, para qué los quiero
Si tengo alas para volar.
- Feet, what do I need them for
  If I have wings to fly.
- Diary illustration, dated 1953, preceding a foot amputation in August of that year; reproduced on page 415 of Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera (1983)

I hope the exit is joyful and I hope never to return.
- Last words in her diary (July 1954)

The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.
- André Breton, Surrealism and Painting (1972)