"Guided only by 'feeling and intsticnt'...he painted a night sky unlike any the world had ever seen with ordinary eyes! A kaleidoscope of pulsating beacons, whirlpools of stars, radiant clouds, and a moon that shone as brightly as any sun- fireworks of cosmic light and energy visible only in Vincent's head" (Naifeh 762).
"I’ve tried to express the terrible human passions with the red and the green. The room is blood-red and dull yellow, a green billiard table in the centre, lemon yellow lamps with an orange and green glow. Everywhere it’s a battle and an antithesis of the most different greens and reds..." (Gogh 676)
"He painted haystacks that looked like houses transformed into hay by some rustic magic, and cottages that blended almost invisibly into the mosaic of fields around them." (Naifeh 847)
"My dear Theo, Just wanted to tell you that I’m hard at work on the potato eaters. I’ve started it again on a new canvas and painted new studies of the heads; changed the hands, in particular, a great deal. Above all, I’m doing my best to put life into it." (Van Gogh 496). This would be considered Van Gogh's first painting.
“Where before he had painted a rolling mosaic of countryside, now he painted ‘vast fields of wheat under troubled skies’- a featureless desert of grain as bare and lonely as the heath. Instead of a crystal-blue sky or a radiant sunset, he painted an ominous darkness and a roil of thunderclouds in deeper and deeper shades of blue” (Naifeh 845).
"I’m thinking of decorating my studio with half a dozen paintings of Sunflowers." (Gogh 665). Van Gogh would indeed create several renditions of one still life of a vase of sunflowers.
"It often seems to me that the night is much more alive and richly colored than the day." (Gogh 676)
"...on December 23, Vincent violently excited, cut off his ear and carried it to a girl..." (Hershman 168)
"They swoop and rise in a panic of escape from the remorselessness of nature." (Naifeh 854). This was the last piece Van Gogh would ever paint before his tragic suicide.