Diane Arbus said...

And the revelation was a little like what saints receive on mountains - a further chapter in the history of the mistery...

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize.

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.

There are and have been and will be an infinite number of things on earth. Individuals all diferent, all wanting different things, all knowing different things, all loving different things, all looking different. Everything that has been on earth has been different from any other thing. That is what I love: the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life... I see something that seems wonderful; I see the divineness in ordinary things.

Nothing is ever alike. The best thing is the difference. I get to keep what nobody needs.

We stand on a precipice, before a chasm, and as we wait it becomes higher, wider, deeper, but I am crazy enough to think it doesn't matter which way we leap because when we leap we will have learned to fly. Is that blasphemy or faith?

When you try very hard to do something by the time you can do it it is easy to do, so effort is maybe a kind of prayer.

I am working on something now, the eccentrics I have so long thought of, or rather people who visibly believe in something everyone doubts.

The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories.

Anxiety is the fear of being afraid.
Ansiety is fear looking for a cause.
If anxiety is the fear of being afraid horror is the experience of what there is no need to be afraid of.

There is so much to learn. Mainly it is never as good as you hope or as bad as you dread.

I seem to be undergoing some subterranean revolution in which the surface hardly stirs but I sleep and dream a lot and once in a while signs erupt that seem portentous to me at least.

I have learned to see that no state of being is intrinsic or autonomous. Oneself is dispensable and so are a whole bunch of one's most precious attributes. But they come back when you can afford the luxury of them again.

What's left after what one isn't is taken away is what one is.

Think of this: That Beauty is itself an aberration, a burden, a mystery, even to itself.

They are the proof that something was there and no longer is. Like a stain. And the stillness of them is boggling. You can turn away but when you come back they'll still be there looking at you.

Somewhere at the very end there is a joke and even though I forget it there are moments when I have fancied I knew just for a second what the punch line was.

(All quotes by Diane Arbus, compiled in Revelations).