Diane Arbus Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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

Diane Arbus
Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.

Diane Arbus
I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

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

Diane Arbus
The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories

Diane Arbus
The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.

Diane Arbus
Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot.... 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
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
It would be beautiful to photograph the winners of everything from Nobel to booby prize, clutching trophy, or money or certificate, solemn or smiling or tear stained or bloody, on the precarious pinnacle of the human landscape.

Diane Arbus
You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.

Diane Arbus
It's impossible to get out of your own skin into somebody else's.... Somebody else's tragedy is not your own.

Diane Arbus
We stand on a precipice, then 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?

Diane Arbus
Lately I've been struck with how I really love what you can't see in a photograph. An actual physical darkness. And it's very thrilling for me to see darkness again.

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

Diane Arbus
Nudists are fond of saying that when you come right down to it everyone is alike, and, again, that when you come right down to it everyone is different.

Diane Arbus
Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there's a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can't help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I've always called the gap between intention and effect.

Diane Arbus
We've all got an identity. You can't avoid it. It's what's left when you take everything else away.

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

Diane Arbus
Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies.

Diane Arbus
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks are born with their trauma. They've already passed it. They're aristocrats.

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

Diane Arbus
All that makes a lunatic are very ordinary ideas of mankind shut up very tight inside a man's head.

Diane Arbus