Alice Sebold Quotes

Nobody takes a picture of something they want to forget.

Photography has definitely been my favorite way to remember things. At least for me that’s how my brain processes things, of memories or moments - if I take a picture of it I can remember so many more details. I think it’s about choosing the exact picture in my head that signifies or symbolizes a moment - almost as if you’re using film. It’s almost archaic.

I used to take photographs just to remember people.

I like to capture moments. It's like a photograph. Ten years from now you look at the photograph and you don't remember it but rather the whole week or month around the photo.

I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.

Imagine there wasn't photography. Where would we be? How would I remember what I looked like as a kid? It links us all. It keeps us all together; it's what our history is.

When I die and my memories die with me, all that will remain will be thousands of yellowing photographs and 35mm negatives in my filing cabinets.

There's a lot of different things that make me want to take photos. A lot of it is, for a long time I've been obsessed with the thought of time travel with my camera.

Photography was a big part of our family.

Memories. That's the thing about photography. I look at the contact sheet, and it brings back everything: whether I was tired, whether I was full of beans.

memory is the only way home.

Photographing expresses human desire to preserve passing time. It is like a man struggling with time that elapses, and in general - a desire to preserve oneself.

We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.

The past always sort of haunts us and perhaps inspires us in some ways.

Every photo, every 'ONCE' in time is also the beginning of a story starting 'once upon a time...' Every photo is the first frame of a movie.

But what of life whose bitter hungry sea Flows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night Covers the days which never more return? Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn We lose too soon, and only find delight In withered husks of some dead memory.

I wish my family had taken more pictures when I was growing up. Instead of always having to draw everything.

To wish for the crazy times one last time and freeze it in the memory of a camera is the least a great artist can do.

Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away.

This is what I like about photographs. They're proof that once, even if just for a heartbeat, everything was perfect.

Photography is a form of time travel.

When we travel, we are like a film at the moment of exposure; it is memory that will develop it.

Music… is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.

I hoped our lives would continue this way forever, but inevitably the past came knocking. Not the good kind that was collectible but the bad kind that had arthritis.

When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.