Self-Portrait with Boy Quotes

“I grew up poor among poor people in a poor town, but I never knew how poor I'd been until I moved to New York. These women with their fresh produce and diamonds and manicures. Even their skin was expensive. What got to me about them wasn't just the way they made me suddenly self-conscious about the ink under my fingernails or the haircut I gave myself in my own bathroom. It wasn't just that they'd spend more in one evening on chocolate, escarole, and jam than I did on the rice and beans and film and photo paper I needed for a week. What enraged me is that they didn't, couldn't, see me. I was less than a machine to them, less than a body. I did not even appear in their line of sight. I was nothing more than a couple of chanted phrases: Cash or charge? Paper or plastic? Thank you, have a nice night.”
― Rachel Lyon, Self-Portrait with Boy

“The very act of recall is like trying to photograph the sky. The infinite and ever-shifting colors of memory, its rippling light, cannot really be captured. Show someone who has never seen the sky a picture of the sky and you show them a picture of nothing.

Still I have to try.”
― Rachel Lyon, Self-Portrait with Boy

“She seemed to have stepped back into herself. It had taken a moment, following the argument with Steve, but now she was present, natural. She’d refilled her self with herself.”
― Rachel Lyon, Self Portrait With Boy

“The thing about remembering is that to recall one memory is to suppress its neighbors. In order to remember you must forget.”
― Rachel Lyon, Self-Portrait with Boy

“She doesn't know. Of course she doesn't know. How could she know? She is the quintessential starving artist. Look at her homemade haircut. She's never had two pickles to rub together. Isn't into pickles at all by the looks of her. Well, I'll tell you. We do it, my little destitute dyke--we do it, my little cash-strapped strap-on--by charging their parents boatloads of money. Not the parents of American Fabius Morales of course. But the parents of his cohort, certainly.”
― Rachel Lyon, Self-Portrait with Boy

“I knew she did not love me, not really. I knew that to her I was just a puzzle piece that had to be forced to fit. And yet as she held me too close, squeezed me hard enough to bruise my ribs, as she cried into my hair, as her tears pooled in my ears I felt: this is what it is like to be loved.”
― Rachel Lyon, Self-Portrait with Boy

“It has often occurred to me in the intervening years that if I'd had a digital camera back then, the kind with a screen where you can look at the picture you've just taken - if in the very moment of taking that four hundredth self-portrait I had seen immediately how the picture had turned out - I might have just deleted it. These days, working in digital, I often delete pictures reflexively. But a strip of plastic, gelatin, and silver halide crystals doesn't just disappear. You have to burn it.”
― Rachel Lyon, Self-Portrait with Boy

“To take that picture would have been an awful thing to do. So again, without even looking through the viewfinder, I turned away.”
― Rachel Lyon, Self-Portrait with Boy