Margaret Bourke-White Quotes

... and because it was a drunken perception, it was perfect, entire, and lasted about half a second.

The perfect moment, once lost, is not easily found again.

Use the occasion, for it passes swiftly.

Perfect moments, especially when they verge on the sublime have the grave disadvantage of being very short lived, which in fact, being obvious, we would not need to mention were it not that they have a still greater disadvantage, which is that we do not know what to do once they are over.

This is what I like about photographs. They're proof that once, even if just for a heartbeat, everything was perfect.

A rainbow which lasts for a quarter of an hour is looked at no longer.

I raised the camera, pretended to study a focus which did not include them, and waited and watched closely, sure that I would finally catch the revealing expression, one that would sum it all up, life that is rhythmed by movement but which a stiff image destroys, taking time in cross section, if we do not choose the essential imperceptible fraction of it.

I knew that it wouldn’t last. It was just a moment, a perfect moment, as time stood still and fleetingly everything fell back into its proper place.

Time runs and flows and only our death succeeds in catching up with it. Photography is a blade which, in eternity, impales the dazzling moment.

Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing.

John Loengard, the picture editor at Life, always used to tell me, ”If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.

All that remains of that minute is time in all its purity, bone-white time.

And you're sorry that the ephemeral beauty has faded so rapidly, so irretrievably, that it flashed so deceptively and pointlessly before your eyes - you're sorry, for you didn't even have time to fall in love.

With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.

A song is like a picture of a bird in flight; the bird was moving before the picture was taken, and no doubt continued after.

A box of new crayons! Now they’re all pointy, lined up in order, bright and perfect. Soon they’ll be a bunch of ground down, rounded, indistinguishable stumps, missing their wrappers and smudged with other colors. Sometimes life seems unbearably tragic.

It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.

Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences.

Nothing is permanently perfect. But there are perfect moments and the will to choose what will bring about more perfect moments.

My picture, Fifth Avenue, Winter is the result of a three hours' stand during a fierce snow-storm on February 22nd 1893, awaiting the proper moment. My patience was duly rewarded. Of course, the result contained an element of chance, as I might have stood there for hours without succeeding in getting the desired pictures.

The technique of 35mm photography appears simple. One is beguiled by the quick viewing and operation, and by the very questionable inclination to make many pictures with the hope that some will be good.

Life is once. Forever.

The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.

The May of life blooms once and never again.