Parenting & Family Quote by Diane Arbus

Men, Arbus suggests, never graduate from neediness; they just get better at dressing it up. The line needles the grown-up myth we sell ourselves - that adulthood is a stable state, a moral promotion, a calm mastery over desire. Instead, it casts maturity as mere scale: bigger bodies, bigger budgets, bigger excuses. “Children of a larger growth” lands like a shrug with teeth, collapsing the distance between the tantrum in a playroom and the tantrum in a boardroom.

The engine here is appetite: not just hunger, but the whole twitchy economy of wanting. “As apt to change” refuses the comforting narrative of consistent values. Today’s conviction becomes tomorrow’s collectible, today’s romance tomorrow’s regret. Arbus’s camera lived in that territory, photographing people on the edges of respectability and, more pointedly, photographing how flimsy the category of “respectable” really is. Her subjects often look straight back at you, making the viewer feel caught in the same craving for novelty, for difference, for a story to consume.

“Full as craving too, and full as vain” doubles down on excess. Not craving in moderation, but stuffed with it; not a touch of vanity, but brimming. The subtext is corrosive: our desires don’t simply mislead us, they inflate us, turning identity into performance. Arbus’s intent isn’t to scold individual weakness so much as to expose a shared embarrassment - that adulthood is a costume, and the seams are always showing.