Quotes from Whitney Otto

While she was in transit, being unattached was exhilarating, but the moment she stopped, so did the high.

I have an affection for those transitional seasons, the way they take the edge off the intense cold of winter, or heat of summer.

Think about what binds you to your husband and he to you. Marvel at the strength of that bond, which is both abstract and concrete, spiritual and legal.

That is the true challenge--to work within a narrow confine. To accept what you cannot have; that from which you cannot deviate.

brotherhood of the firstborn, which can be both a blessing and a curse: the overwhelming attention to the detail of their lives and development. The expectations that run too high: being the bridge between adults and children, one foot in either place and the accompanying hollow lonely feeling of being nowhere.

Berlin was charismatic in the roguish way of a love... It was a lover who was a little dangerous in ways that didn't always show, keeping you a bit on edge, a bit in love and endlessly forgiving because he made her feel that she was exactly where she was meant to be... Berlin made you like who you were when you were there, as if everything worth being a part of in the world - all those modern ideas about sex and art and women; all that possibility - was right there, in its dark, beating heart.

I never think anyone in love is foolish. We do the best we can.

but she never knew what it was like to walk away from the thing she had most wanted. Years later she would say, Photography allowed me to make the world and be in the world.

I once started out to walk around the world but ended up with you. Thank God.

She remembered her fingers threaded through his hair and his kisses in places that made her long for him years later.

It was hard not to feel resentment that men weren't forced into these choices. Some days she felt that she would spend all her time trying to forget her life before children because she loved them too much to be reminded of the heat of Rome in the summer and a beautiful girl who turned heads as she walked down an Italian strada .

S___ likes being around other people; she just isn't particularly comfortable talking to them. She supposes that she is some variety of voyeur, enjoying the spectacle, breathing in the atmosphere, while experiencing uneasiness when asked to become part of it. None of this makes her unhappy. The life of a wallflower, she often thinks, is not such a terrible life.

that would be too much like running away, and that, she would not do. She does not run—they cannot make her—she walks.

Later, Jenny would say she seldom knew what she would take a picture of when she picked up a camera, that she only knew once she peered through the viewfinder, as if the photograph had finally found her.

If the photographer isn't going to pay attention to the picture he is making, that if he thinks the camera is just a machine and not an avenue of expression, then he has no business asking anyone for anything, let alone their time and interest. Don't show the world, he said, invent the world.

Read The Story of O. Convince yourself that it was in fact written by a woman or someone who thinks like a woman.

Among the things she said: Women seem to possess all the natural gifts essential to a good portraitist ... such as personality, patience and intuition. The sitter ought to be the predominating factor in a successful portrait. Men portraitist are apt to forget this; they are inclined to lose the sitter in a maze of technique luxuriating in the cleverness and beauty of their own medium.

She eventually forgave him, because she understood him.