Rachel Lyon > Quotes

“I grew up poor among poor people in a poor town, but I never knew how poor I'd been until I moved to New York. These women with their fresh produce and diamonds and manicures. Even their skin was expensive. What got to me about them wasn't just the way they made me suddenly self-conscious about the ink under my fingernails or the haircut I gave myself in my own bathroom. It wasn't just that they'd spend more in one evening on chocolate, escarole, and jam than I did on the rice and beans and film and photo paper I needed for a week. What enraged me is that they didn't, couldn't, see me. I was less than a machine to them, less than a body. I did not even appear in their line of sight. I was nothing more than a couple of chanted phrases: Cash or charge? Paper or plastic? Thank you, have a nice night.”
― Rachel Lyon, Self-Portrait with Boy

“The very act of recall is like trying to photograph the sky. The infinite and ever-shifting colors of memory, its rippling light, cannot really be captured. Show someone who has never seen the sky a picture of the sky and you show them a picture of nothing.

Still I have to try.”
― Rachel Lyon, Self-Portrait with Boy

“She seemed to have stepped back into herself. It had taken a moment, following the argument with Steve, but now she was present, natural. She’d refilled her self with herself.”
― Rachel Lyon, Self Portrait With Boy

“To take that picture would have been an awful thing to do. So again, without even looking through the viewfinder, I turned away.”
― Rachel Lyon, Self-Portrait with Boy

“Is this what it is like, she wonders, to be an adult; is this what it will be like from now on; will she always be so sad, so alone; will she always yearn this way for comfort, or for company, or—? What does she yearn for?”
― Rachel Lyon, Fruit of the Dead

“occasional visits by violence are part of the cost of growing up female.”
― Rachel Lyon, Fruit of the Dead

“They called her fussy, fussy, which struck me as a terribly effeminate word—a word for a prima donna, for a fastidious grandmother, perhaps, not for anyone so terrified and alien as a baby. Her cries were furious and agonized as if she’d witnessed the end of a world.”
― Rachel Lyon, Fruit of the Dead

“and she feels tugged toward him, a corporeal acquiescence, as natural and strangely physical as if he had her on a leash.”
― Rachel Lyon, Fruit of the Dead

“As far as she can tell she has no interests, no desires except to spend time outdoors, far away from home, to lose herself in the intricacies of a landscape, to bliss out under the ever-changing sun.”
― Rachel Lyon, Fruit of the Dead

“Most people, they go their whole lives craving only contentment, undelayed gratification: the comforts of fictions, falsehoods, and consumption, the dull blank of satiation.”
― Rachel Lyon, Fruit of the Dead

“It has often occurred to me in the intervening years that if I'd had a digital camera back then, the kind with a screen where you can look at the picture you've just taken - if in the very moment of taking that four hundredth self-portrait I had seen immediately how the picture had turned out - I might have just deleted it. These days, working in digital, I often delete pictures reflexively. But a strip of plastic, gelatin, and silver halide crystals doesn't just disappear. You have to burn it.”
― Rachel Lyon, Self-Portrait with Boy