Quotes from Deborah Copaken Kogan

When it comes down to it, I believe that, having made the decision to bring children into the world, I owe it to them to be as present as I can in their daily lives and to try my best to stay alive until they've made it through to adulthood.

This is what sexism does best: it makes you feel crazy for desiring parity and hopeless about ever achieving it.

Photography forces one out into the world, interacting with people and the environment. It flexes all those right brain, spatially-adept muscles.

My husband and I were born three weeks apart, and our plan had always been to throw a joint party for our 40th birthdays.

I am nothing if not rational about what is worthy of my anxiety and what is not, and I refuse to live my life as if a giant bus is just around the corner, waiting to crush me the minute I step off the curb.

I do miss the excitement of seeing history up close, of having intimate knowledge, through direct experience, of what happens when people and governments clash, but I do not miss the danger or the constant displacement.

I have an Emmy, but it's no big deal: work in TV news long enough, you eventually get one.

I'd always assumed that by 40 I'd have at least a modicum of stability - a steady income, an established career, a bountiful fullness, like a pillow into which I could sink as I entered the second half of my life.

When it comes to writers, I'm a huge fan of Ian McEwan. I've never taken a writing course, but reading and deconstructing his novels has been as good a lesson as any.

Stories are how we make sense of our lives. To tell a story is to own it: to own the narrative thread to own a piece of our past. And when we own a story when we put it in a tidy box and store it on a high shelf it becomes manageable so that whatever negative effects it's been having on us are in theory lessened.

If I've learned anything in the twenty-five years that have transpired between graduation and today it is this: I am stronger than I thought I was and weaker than I'd hoped to be, and in between those two extremes is a little thing called life.

My truth she'd said to him. What the hell is truth anyway Two separate questions yes. But not wholly unrelated. For truth no matter the modifier is always intrinsically modified.

I loved to press the shutter, to freeze time, to turn little slices of life into rectangle rife with metaphor.

I love this idea, Bruno says. Of being broken but finding pleasure in it.

People should not be allowed to be born that beautiful. They get away with too much. Beauty is truth? That last couplet always bothered me. In art, in an urn, maybe, but in people, no way. In fact, sometimes I think physical beauty may be the biggest scam ever played upon mankind.

I stop to change my film. Without the camera to shield my eyes, I start to feel weak. Queasy. The room tilts. I see the heart lying there, inert and cold. I see the women shoving it back inside the chest cavity... I picture the cavity behind my eyes, and instead of a brain I imagine an enormous roll of film, winding maniacally inside a bloodless metallic skull. A simple recording device, nothing more.

What does it mean, all these tiny actions, these hidden secrets, these fragile humans with their hardships and friendships and fuckships that survive the slog-sprint through time? Don't you all realize? We all end up dust.