Imogen Sara Smith:

The power of great photographs comes from the tension between what they reveal and what they withhold. Cut off from time before and after, they have the excitement of mysteries forever on the verge of being solved.

Vivian Maier refused to show her work, but she refused just as stubbornly to be invisible. She was both hiding and seeking. Whether she wanted to be found will always remain her secret.

Stephen Dunn:

I'd come so far, it seemed,
happily looking for so little.

But then I saw a cow in a room
looking at the painting of a cow
in a field -- all of which
was a painting itself --
and I felt I'd been invited
into the actual, someplace
between the real and the real.

Stefany Anne Golberg:

I'm frightened of infinity, Cornell once told his sister, I'm frightened of many things. Cornell found comfort in the writings of Mary Baker Eddy (the founder of Christian Science), which told him that time was unreal. Through Eddy, Cornell came to see history as a jumbled invention of man. Real time was eternal. The stuff inside Pandora's box was eternity broken in pieces. Collage = reality. Joseph Cornell tried to take those broken bits and fit them together again. Each time he tried, the result was another beautiful failure.

Scott Adams:

Goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.

Savas Dimopoulos:

Jumping from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm is the big secret to success.