Time & Perspective Quote by Georgia O'Keeffe

O'Keeffe is describing attention as an act of possession, almost a gentle kind of force. A flower becomes "your world for the moment" not because it is objectively grand, but because looking collapses scale: the ordinary is made total. That phrasing is painterly. It suggests the way her canvases crop, enlarge, and isolate subjects until they stop being decoration and start being environment.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of modern speed, especially urban speed. "Most people in the city rush around" reads like a diagnosis of perception under industrial life: vision turns instrumental, aimed at navigation and productivity, not encounter. O'Keeffe isn't nostalgic so much as combative about it. The line "I want them to see it whether they want to or not" is the giveaway. This isn't the sweet sentiment of a nature lover; it's the will of an artist who understands that the public often treats looking as optional, even indulgent.

Context matters: O'Keeffe made her name in a New York art world that was rapidly professionalizing modernism, then famously retreated (and reinvented herself) in the American Southwest. Her flower paintings, endlessly reproduced and frequently misread through sexualized or sentimental lenses, can be understood here as a strategy: if a culture won't slow down for intimacy with the real, she will engineer it through scale and insistence.

What makes the quote work is its mild coercion. She frames art not as escape, but as an intervention into attention. The flower is a trapdoor out of the city's trance.