Creativity Quote by Beatrice Wood

Wood’s line lands like a quiet rebuke to the modern addiction to instant empathy. “You can’t realize, you can’t know” repeats the same prohibition twice, as if she’s swatting away two different delusions: that imagination can fully substitute for experience, and that sympathy can graduate into certainty. The phrasing is plain, almost stubbornly unpoetic, which is part of its force. It refuses to dress up a hard truth in consoling language.

Coming from Beatrice Wood, the self-styled “Mama of Dada,” the sentence also reads as an artist’s manifesto. Dada distrusted grand narratives and polite meaning-making; Wood’s work in ceramics and performance cultivated surfaces, glazes, masks - ways of admitting that what you see isn’t the whole story. Her long life spanned wars, avant-garde circles, public scandal, and the slow reinvention of women’s artistic authority. The quote carries that lived skepticism: people will project, assume, diagnose. They’ll narrate your life into something digestible.

The subtext isn’t “don’t care.” It’s “be careful with the claim to understand.” In a culture that treats “I know exactly how you feel” as the password to intimacy, Wood argues for a tougher kind of respect: listening without annexing someone else’s pain, and leaving room for the private parts that never translate. That boundary is not coldness; it’s precision.