Creativity Quote by Beatrice Wood

There is a sly stamina in this line, a kind of anti-heroic manifesto disguised as a shrug. Beatrice Wood, who lived past 100 and kept working deep into old age, frames persistence not as a clean upward arc but as a recurring near-collapse. "Over and over" does the heavy lifting: it turns quitting into a loop, not a single dramatic decision. The rhythm suggests rehearsal, like a line she’s said to herself in the studio while clay slumps, glaze misbehaves, or the whole enterprise feels faintly ridiculous.

The subtext is less "I might stop" than "I keep arriving at the edge and staying there". That edge is where artists actually live: in the gap between taste and ability, ambition and energy, the private dread that the next piece will prove you were always a fraud. Wood was associated with Dada and the wider modernist rebellion, scenes that prized irreverence and treated "seriousness" as both fuel and target. The quote carries that Dada-inflected wink: giving up is perpetually imminent, yet somehow never happens. Even despair becomes material.

It also reads as a quiet rebuttal to the mythology of artistic confidence. Wood doesn’t sell genius; she sells process, the relentlessness of showing up while doubting yourself. The intent feels almost pedagogical: if you’re "on the point" of quitting, congratulations, you’re working. The line normalizes the churn, making endurance less about willpower than about returning, again, to the same brink and choosing the studio anyway.