Diane Arbus > Quotes

“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.”
― Diane Arbus

“The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.”
― Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus Revelations

“My favorite thing is to go where I've never been.”
― Diane Arbus

“There's a quality of legend about freaks.
Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.”
― Diane Arbus

“Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding”
― Diane Arbus

“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.”
― Diane Arbus

“One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.”
― Diane Arbus

“The discouragement masquerades as the impossibility.”
― Diane Arbus

“My favorite thing is to go where I have never gone.”
― Diane Arbus

“...I would never choose a subject for what it means to me. I choose a subject and then what I feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold. ”
― Diane Arbus

“For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.”
― Diane Arbus

“What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.”
― Diane Arbus

“One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.”
― Diane Arbus

“... I must begin at whatever pace is possible, to work on the book of my own that i vaguely keep assuming lies at the end of the rainbow. It is after all my rainbow and if I don't do it no one else will...Survival is the secret so you really can't afford to doubt yourself for long because you are all you've got. The only thing to do is to go the limit with it. Exceed.”
― Diane Arbus

“Ladies and Gentlemen, take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice.”
― Diane Arbus

“My favourite thing is to go where I´ve never been.”
― Diane Arbus

“I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.”
― Diane Arbus

“If the fall of man consists in the separation of god and the devil the serpent must have appeared out of the middle of the apple when Eve bit like the original worm in it, splitting it in half and sundering everything which was once one into a pair of opposites, so the world is Noah's ark on the sea of eternity containing all the endless pairs of things, irreconcilable and inseparable, and heat will always long for cold and the back for the front and smiles for tears and mutt for jeff and no for yes with the most unutterable nostalgia there is.”
― Diane Arbus