Whitney Otto > Quotes

“Why are old lovers able to become friends? Two reasons. They never truly loved each other, or they love each other still.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“No one fights dirtier or more brutally than blood; only family knows it’s own weaknesses, the exact placement of the heart. The tragedy is that one can still live with the force of hatred, feel infuriated that once you are born to another, that kinship lasts through life and death, immutable, unchanging, no matter how great the misdeed or betrayal. Blood cannot be denied, and perhaps that’s why we fight tooth and claw, because we cannot—being only human—put asunder what God has joined together.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“The best men tell you the truth because they think you can take it; the worst men either try to preserve you in some innocent state with their false protection, or are ‘brutally honest.’ When someone tells, lets you think for yourself, experience your own emotions, he is treating you as a true equal, a friend…And the best men cook for you.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“…she eventually forgave him, because she understood him.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“she is admired from afar. These admirers court her in secret, in the safety of their dreams.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“Once you love, you cannot take it back, cannot undo it; what you felt may have changed, shifted slightly, yet still remains love. You still feel-though very small-the not-altogether unpleasant shock of soul recognition for that person.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“No one knows how another person feels in private.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“You have to choose your combinations careful. The right choices will enhance your quilt. The wrong choices will dull the colors and hide their original beauty. There are no rules you can follow. You have to go by instinct and you have to be brave.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“The worst dream of the night, when you are parted from someone you love and you do not know exactly where he is, but you know that he is in the presence of danger. You are tormented by a desire to keep the one you love safe.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“The truly terrible thing about this life, was not knowing what you want, but only able to recognize what you do not want. You have to spend so much time and energy trying to find it out, time that other people spent in pursuing of their desires.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“All you have to go on is the faith of a kiss.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“I have an affection for those transitional seasons, the way they take the edge off the intense cold of winter, or heat of summer.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“While she was in transit, being unattached was exhilarating, but the moment she stopped, so did the high.”
― Whitney Otto, Eight Girls Taking Pictures

“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.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“That is the true challenge--to work within a narrow confine. To accept what you cannot have; that from which you cannot deviate.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“…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.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“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.”
― Whitney Otto, Eight Girls Taking Pictures

“I never think anyone in love is foolish. We do the best we can.”
― Whitney Otto, Eight Girls Taking Pictures

“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.”
― Whitney Otto, A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity

“...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.”
― Whitney Otto, Eight Girls Taking Pictures

“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.”
― Whitney Otto, Eight Girls Taking Pictures

“She remembered her fingers threaded through his hair and his kisses in places that made her long for him years later.”
― Whitney Otto, Eight Girls Taking Pictures

“Julius explained that the palace rooms where they stood were called Wunderkammers, or wonder rooms. Souvenirs of nature, of travels across continents and seas; jewels and skulls. A show of wealth, intellect, power.

The first room had rose-colored glass walls, with rubies and garnets and bloodred drapes of damask. Bowls of blush quartz; semiprecious stone roses running the spectrum of red down to pink, a hard, glittering garden. The vaulted ceiling, a feature of all the ten rooms Julius and Cymbeline visited, was a trompe l'oeil of a rosy sky at down, golden light edging the morning clouds.

The next room was of sapphire and sea and sky; lapis lazuli, turquoise and gold and silver. A silver mermaid lounged on the edge of a lapis lazuli bowl fashioned in the shape of an ocean. Venus stood aloft on the waves draped in pearls. There were gold fish and diamond fish and faceted sterling silver starfish. Silvered mirrors edged in silvered mirror. There were opals and aquamarines and tanzanite and amethyst. Seaweed bloomed in shades of blue-green marble. The ceiling was a dome of endless, pale blue.

A jungle room of mica and marble followed, with its rain forest of cats made from tiger's-eye, yellow topaz birds, tortoiseshell giraffes with stubby horns of spun gold. Carved clouds of smoky quartz hovered over a herd of obsidian and ivory zebras. Javelinas of spotted pony hide charged tiny, life-sized dik-diks with velvet hides, and dazzling diamond antlers mingled with miniature stuffed sable minks. Agate columns painted a medley of dark greens were strung with faceted ropes of green gold.

A room of ivory: bone, teeth, skulls, and velvet.

A room crowded with columns all sheathed in mirrors, reflecting world maps and globes and atlases inlaid with silver, platinum, and white gold; the rubies and diamonds that were sometimes set to mark the location of a city or a town of conquest resembled blood and tears.

A room dominated by a fireplace large enough to hold several people, upholstered in velvets and silks the colors of flame. Snakes of gold with orange sapphire and yellow topaz eyes coiled around the room's columns.

Statues of smiling black men in turbans offering trays of every gem imaginable-emerald, sapphire, ruby, topaz, diamond-stood at the entrance to a room upholstered in pistachio velvet, accented with malachite, called the Green Vault. Peridot wood nymphs attended to a Diana carved from a single pure crystal of quartz studded with tiny tourmalines. Jade tables, and jade lanterns. The royal jewels, blinding in their sparkling excess: crowns, tiaras, coronets, diadems, heavy ceremonial necklaces, rings, and bracelets that could span a forearm, surrounding the world's largest and most perfect green diamond.

Above it all was a night sky of painted stars, with inlaid cut crystal set in a serious of constellations.”
― Whitney Otto, Eight Girls Taking Pictures

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

Thank God.”
― Whitney Otto, Eight Girls Taking Pictures

“…that would be too much like running away, and that, she would not do. She does not run—they cannot make her—she walks.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“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.”
― Whitney Otto, Eight Girls Taking Pictures

“Amadora was never far from her understanding of women, glamour, or the fine line between elegant and camp, vulgar and vibrant, life and dreams. ... Color, she believed, was feminine. She said that women were masters of color, evidenced in changing their hair color, using eye shadow, mascara, powder, rouge, lipstick. You could see it in their jewelry- silvers and golds, gems, stones, pearls of every hue. It was in their clothing, from what they slept in to what they danced in. Their shoes. Their purses. Ribbons, barrettes, clips, and tiaras. Veils. All this color to enhance their sex appeal, while men, she felt, were ill-equipped to handle color with the same ease.”
― Whitney Otto, Eight Girls Taking Pictures

“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.”
― Whitney Otto, Eight Girls Taking Pictures

“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.”
― Whitney Otto, Eight Girls Taking Pictures

“There must be some place along the route, a halfway house in time, where the runners may pause and ask themselves why they run, what is the prize and is it the prize they really want?”
― Whitney Otto, A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity