Brandon Stanton

I’ve got what I want. I’ve got a place to live, a girlfriend, and a child. My biggest struggle is just figuring out how to maintain.

It's important to always have people who remember you at various stages of your life. It's especially important as you get older, because there are less of those people around. And they remind you of who you are.

In some neighborhoods, faces mature faster than bodies.

She won't talk to me until I get my shit together.'
'Who's she?'
'Every man has a She.

When my husband was dying, I said 'Moe, how am I supposed to live without you?' He told me: 'Take the love you have for me and spread it around.

But in a world where stories are selected for their negativity, randomness can easily be mistaken for positivity.

I want to be a mailman so I can let people know when it’s their birthday.” NEW YORK, UNITED STATES

Some places are only written about when something extreme happens: like a murder, or an explosion, or a war. Only then do the cameras come running, because conflict makes for a great story. Unfortunately this means that much of the works is only seen through the lens of conflict. And when these are the only stories we hear, the world seems like a pretty scary place.

My dad died in 9/11. They opened up the museum to families today, so I went this morning. My plan was to go to work after, but I just couldn’t do it.”“What happened to him?”“He was a cop. He actually had the day off. But as soon as he heard, he drove into the city and got there just in time for the second tower to fall. A witness said that my dad had started to run when the tower fell, but turned back because a trapped woman was calling to him.”“What do you remember?”“I was in science class. And my teacher told us that there had been a plane crash. That’s all she said. Then I noticed all these kids around me getting phone calls and text messages, and they’d run out of class. So I knew something big was happening. Soon we got let out of school. On the ride home, I remember thinking that my dad was going to be working overtime on this. I imagined he’d be down there everyday, saving people. ‘I bet I won’t see him for weeks,’ I said.

Lives are made of chapters. And after one is written, it cannot be revisited. But, we can write a new chapter with each new day.

I didn’t even really like animals. But my daughter said she wanted a pet. So I brought home this kitten, and told my daughter: ‘It’s your responsibility. I’m not going to get involved.’ But now the kitten loves me more than the girl. I call him JJ. He’s always the first one to greet me when I come home. When I leave for work, he lays on my flip-flops by the door. He always wants to be with me. Right now we’re coming back from a trip to the store. My daughter is a little jealous. She’s always trying to steal him from me.” MEDELLíN, COLOMBIA

The more times I fall in love, the less sure I am about love.

I’ve been married fifty years.
If I was to give one piece of advice to young couples, it’d be this: Never lose your temper at the same time. If somebody’s really mad, the other one better make a retreat.

Enjoy your life as long as you want, but the moment the pain becomes too much, it’s in your hands to stop it.

Right after I lost vision in my eye, I was so bad at walking that I ran into a girl eating ice cream, and knocked her cone out of her hand. She screamed: ‘Are you blind!?!?’ I turned to her and said: 'I am blind actually, I’m so sorry, I’ll buy you a new cone.’ And she said: 'Oh my God! I’m so sorry! Don’t worry! It’s no problem at all! I’ll buy another one.’ So we walked into the ice cream store together, and the clerk said: 'I heard the whole thing. Ice cream is free.