Great Throughts Treasury

"Time, memory, loss and love are my main artistic concerns, but time, among all of them, becomes the determinant."

"To be able to take my pictures, I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about. And I must do so with both ardor and cool appraisal, with the passions of eye and heart, but in that ardent heart there must also be a splinter of ice."

"Unless you photograph what you love, you're not going to make good art."

"To identify a person as a Southerner suggests not only that her history is inescapable and formative but that it is also impossibly present. Southerners live uneasily at the nexus between myth and reality, watching the mishmash amalgam of sorrow, humility, honor, graciousness, and renegade defiance play out against a backdrop of profligate physical beauty."

"Whatever of my memories hadn?t crumbled into dust must surely by now have been altered by the passage of time. I tend to agree with the theory that if you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the last time you recalled it. With tiny differences creeping in at each cycle, the exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us farther away."

"Very few males have the confidence to appear vulnerable."

"What is truth in photography? It can be told in a hundred different ways. Every thirtieth of a second when the shutter snaps, its capturing a different piece of information."

"When I read something, I picture that scene in that detail. That becomes very similar to composing a photo in real life."

"When an animal, a rabbit, say, beds down in a protecting fencerow, the weight and warmth of his curled body leaves a mirroring mark upon the ground. The grasses often appear to have been woven into a birdlike nest, and perhaps were indeed caught and pulled around by the delicate claws as he turned in a circle before subsiding into rest. This soft bowl in the grasses, this body-formed evidence of hare, has a name, an obsolete but beautiful word: meuse. (Enticingly close to Muse, daughter of Memory, and source of inspiration.) Each of us leaves evidence on the earth that in various ways bears our form."

"When I read, I take notes and underline things. So reading is a vigorous process for me, but I read in bed. My poor husband is trying to go to sleep, and I'm reaching over him to get the Post-it notes."

"When we were on the farm, we were isolated, not just by geography but by the primitive living conditions: no electricity, no running water and, of course, no computer, no phone."

"When you look at your life as an artist, you do see that when you get to be 60, you're coming - this is the last chapter."

"Where does the self actually go? All the accumulation of memory ? the mist rising from the river and the birth of children and the flying tails of the Arabians in the field ? and all the arcane formulas, the passwords, the poultice recipes, the Latin names of trees, the location of the safe deposit key, the complex skills to repair and build and grow and harvest ? when someone dies, where does it all go?"

"You have to just go on. It's sort of like a bird flying into a plate glass window. And then you just sort of pick yourself up, shake yourself off, and check for anything broken, and go back to work."

"When the good pictures come, we hope they tell truths, but truths 'told slant,' just as Emily Dickinson commanded."

"You can tell a good ruined lens, right from the get-go.... That?s the kind of lens I'm looking for."

"Writing is much, much harder than taking pictures because you have to man-haul it all out of your insides."

"You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it."