Deborah Copaken Kogan > Quotes

“Because that was the problem, really, wasn’t it, with being human? You couldn’t just be, couldn’t just live and exist without dragging your feet through the mud. You had to communicate, congregate, collaborate, cohabiate. You had to corroborate. Copulate. You had to co-this, co-that, co—bloody-everything, and if you weren’t co-operating you were operating with the co, which was a declaration less of independence than of relativity. You could only really exist in relation to others.”
― Deborah Copaken Kogan

“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.”
― Deborah Copaken Kogan, Between Here and April

“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.”
― Deborah Copaken Kogan, The Red Book

“I loved to press the shutter, to freeze time, to turn little slices of life into rectangle rife with metaphor.”
― Deborah Copaken Kogan, Shutterbabe

“Female readers, on the other hand, were unmoved by the book, one of them going so far as to give it the ultimate insult on a well-trafficked book blog: She "flung it across the room.”
― Deborah Copaken Kogan

“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.”
― Deborah Copaken Kogan, Between Here and April

“Call it the curse of the photographer. Unlike the memories of my childhood--fuzzy around the edges, suffused more with movement and smell and sound than with the rigidity of graphic lines and shapes--most of the memories I have since becoming a photographer are four-sided and flat. When you learn to properly frame an image in the viewfinder of a camera, you start to frame and catalog everything you see, whether you photograph it or not. And suddenly, memory has the shape of a rectangle. The vastness of a forest becomes twelve trees with a rock balancing out the foreground. A person becomes a close-up of the crow's-feet around his eyes. A war becomes red blood in white snow. Sometimes I feel like my brain has become nothing more than an overstuffed spiral notebook full of negatives, printed at will in a disorganized flurry by the slightest provocation.”
― Deborah Copaken Kogan, Shutterbabe

“We women are cursed. Never mind the blood and the mess; that I can deal with. I'm talking about the fear of female sexuality, pure and not so simple. What is it about our bodies that scares men so, makes them take such extreme measures to put us in our places? If they're not stopping us on the streets in the supposedly enlightened parts of the world to whistle, grab their crotches, lick their tongues between opened fingers, yell obscenities or proposition us with erect bananas - I, like most women, speak from a deep well of experience here - then they're hiding us under burkas or veils in other parts of the world so that they won't be tempted to do so.”
― Deborah Copaken Kogan, Shutterbabe

“I love this idea," Bruno says. "Of being broken but finding pleasure in it.”
― Deborah Copaken Kogan, The Red Book

“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.”
― Deborah Copaken Kogan, Shutterbabe

“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.”
― Deborah Copaken Kogan, The Red Book

“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.”
― Deborah Copaken Kogan, Shutterbabe