Daily Inspiration Quote by Diane Arbus

Restlessness is Arbus's engine: the desire to place her body, and then her camera, exactly where comfort stops. "My favourite thing is to go where I've never been" reads like a travel slogan until you remember who’s speaking. Arbus wasn’t chasing novelty for its own sake; she was chasing the edge of the known social map, the rooms polite culture pretends don’t exist.

The line is disarmingly simple, almost childlike, which is part of its force. It makes transgression sound like play. That tonal innocence masks a harder intent: to break the spell of familiarity. For Arbus, the familiar is a lie we agree to so we can keep moving through the day. "Never been" isn’t just geography. It’s a willingness to enter lives and scenes the mainstream treats as spectacle or taboo, then refuse the easy moral category. Her portraits of outsiders, performers, and people living outside bourgeois norms weren’t attempts to "include" them in a feel-good way; they were confrontations with the viewer’s appetite to stare, judge, or sentimentalize.

Context matters: mid-century America, prosperous and tightly scripted, with a booming culture of normalcy. Arbus’s statement is a quiet revolt against that script, a creative method and a personal compulsion. It also hints at the ethical tension in her work: going where you’ve never been can mean curiosity, but it can also mean trespass. The quote lands because it admits both, turning exploration into a confession of need.