Walker Evans > Quotes

“Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
― Walker Evans

“Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.”
― Walker Evans

“Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
― Walker Evans

“Die knowing something. You're not here long.”
― Walker Evans

“The eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.”
― Walker Evans, Walker Evans

“This is why the camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time; and is why in turn I feel such rage at its misuse: which has spread so nearly universal a corruption of sight that I know of less than a dozen alive whose eyes I can trust even so much as my own.”
― Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

“Wiser and more capable men than I shall ever be have put their findings before you, findings so rich and so full of anger, serenity, murder, healing, truth, and love that it seems incredible the world were not destroyed and fulfilled in the instant, but you are too much for them: the weak in courage are strong in cunning; and one by one, you have absorbed and have captured and dishonored, and have distilled of your deliverers the most ruinous of all your poisons; people hear Beethoven in concert halls, or over a bridge game, or to relax; Cézannes are hung on walls, reproduced, in natural wood frames; van Gogh is the man who cut off his ear and whose yellows became recently popular in window decoration; Swift loved individuals but hated the human race; Kafka is a fad; Blake is in the Modern Library; Freud is a Modern Library Giant; Dovschenko’s Frontier is disliked by those who demand that it fit the Eisenstein esthetic; nobody reads Joyce any more; Céline is a madman who has incurred the hearty dislike of Alfred Kazin, reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune book section, and is, moreover, a fascist; I hope I need not mention Jesus Christ of whom you have managed to make a dirty gentile. However”
― Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families

“That impulse took hold of me so powerfully, from my whole body, not by thought, that I caught myself from doing it exactly and as scarcely as you snatch yourself from jumping from a sheer height: here, with the realization that it would have frightened them still worse (to say nothing of me) and would have been still less explicable; so that I stood and looked into their eyes and loved them, and wished to God I was dead.”
― Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families

“There is tenderness and sweetness and mutual pleasure in such a ‘flirtation’ which one would not for the world restrain or cancel”
― Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families

“a new suit of overalls has among its beauties those of a blueprint: and they are a map of a working man.”
― Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families

“All over the whole round earth and in the settlements”
― Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families