“The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph.”

“It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.”

“to show that [the success of my portray-] photographs was not due to subject matter – not to special trees or faces, or interiors, to special privileges – clouds were there for everyone... I wanted to photograph clouds to find out what I had learned in forty years about photography. Through clouds to put down my philosophy of life... My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs that unless one has eyes and sees, they won't be seen – and still everyone will never forget them having once looked at them.”

“Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.”

“A photograph it a souvenir of a memory.
It is not a moment.
It is the looking at the photograph that becomes the moment. Your own moment.”

“No skill, no special apti­tude, no vividness of imagination or precision of thinking would go unrecognized because the child who possessed it was of one sex rather than the other. No child would be relentlessly shaped to one pattern of behavior, but instead there should be many patterns, in a world that had learned to allow to each individual the pattern which was most congenial to his gifts.”

“The imagination has made more discoveries than the eye.”

“Our first endeavors are purely instinctive prompting of an imagination vivid and undisciplined. As we grow older reason asserts itself and we become more and more systematic and designing. But those early impulses, though not immediately productive, are of the greatest moment and may shape our very destinies. Indeed, I feel now that had I understood and cultivated instead of suppressing them, I would have added substantial value to my bequest to the world. But not until I had attained manhood did I realize that I was an inventor.”

“I say, then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain”

“You think you have mastered it [the wallpaper pattern], but just as you get well under way in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you.”