Home > Author > Jasmin Darznik
21 " Lodged deep in me, deep as muscle, bone, and blood, was the idea of myself as a cripple. I couldn't say the word aloud, but it was at the center of everything. Polio had plucked me out of an ordinary life, which gave me a sort of freedom. If I hadn't gotten sick, I might never have become a person who was happiest in a darkroom. And yet. Shame was in my drop foot. Loneliness was there. The constant fear of exposure and the burden of concealment -- it was all there in the drag of my leg. "
― Jasmin Darznik
22 " A portrait is many things: a document, a moment in time, a refuge for memory. But above all, it is the meeting of two people, the seer and the seen. "
23 " Then one day everything changed. I was walking in my old mackintosh past the City of Paris after work, when I caught my reflection in the store window. There it was, plain as day: That coat made me invisible. I’d worn it for years on my walks through New York, walks on which I’d learned the pleasure of solitude and begun to shed my fear of being out alone in the city. A few weeks before, I’d nearly thrown it away outside the ferry building, but looking at myself now, I saw its power was undiminished; if anything, it was stronger "
― Jasmin Darznik , The Bohemians
24 " Remember its flight, for the bird is mortal. —Forugh Farrokhzad, Iranian poet (1935–1967) "
― Jasmin Darznik , Song of a Captive Bird
25 " All at once the desert was everywhere, and I was overcome with a feeling of relief. Sand, rocks, hills—the whole landscape was tinted the same shade of orange as the sky. "
26 " It was autumn, the season of pomegranate and quince. The scent of roasted nuts and barbecued corn from the street vendors, of mud-packed alleyways, gasoline fumes, and concrete roads—I hadn’t known, until I encountered them again, how much I’d missed the city. "
27 " Our garden had fallen to ruin, and I would never forgive my father’s sin in destroying it. "
28 " Surely you’d agree it’s as necessary for an artist to show people the evidence of life’s beauty as it is to give them a document of its ugliness and despair? "