Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
What These Words Mean
You know that small rush you feel when you step off a train in a city you have never seen before, or open a door in your own town that you have walked past for years? There is a thin, bright edge of aliveness in that moment. Your senses sharpen. Even the air feels different on your skin. That thin edge is what these words are chasing.
"My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been."
The first part, "My favorite thing," sounds like someone talking about a hobby. It is the kind of phrase you might use for coffee, a song, or a place you like to sit. On the surface, it is casual, almost light. But when you slow down, you hear a quiet confession: this is not just something enjoyable, this is the experience that sits at the center of what makes life feel worth living for you. You are being invited to ask yourself: what truly wakes you up inside? What is the experience that, if it disappeared from your days, would make everything feel flatter? These words suggest that for some people, the deepest joy is not comfort, not certainty, but something more unsettled: the pull of the unknown.
Then comes the heart of it: "is to go where I’ve never been." At first, you might picture travel. New cities, different streets, strange signs, the soft hum of a language you do not understand. You, with a backpack or a small suitcase, stepping into a place where you do not quite know the rules yet. In this sense, it is about moving your body through space, crossing a border between the familiar and the unfamiliar.
Underneath that simple picture is a way of being in the world. To go where you have never been is not just geography. It is walking into a conversation you usually avoid. It is choosing a book from a section of the library you never touch. It is admitting, even to yourself, "I do not know how to do this, but I will try anyway." These words point to a love of edges and thresholds: the moment just before you understand, when your mind is still stretching and your heart is still deciding whether to be scared or excited. It is about learning to crave that stretch instead of fleeing from it.
Think of a grounded moment: you agree to meet a friend at a gathering where you do not know anyone else. You arrive, open the door, and hear a different kind of music than you usually listen to, smell unfamiliar food warming the room, feel the slight awkwardness of not knowing where to stand. For a second, you want to leave. But then you stay. You say hello. You ask questions. You discover a new kind of laughter, a new story, a new version of yourself who can belong in more places than you thought. That is "to go where I’ve never been" in everyday clothing.
I think these words hold a quiet bravery. They say: let your favorite thing be the crossing into newness, not the walling off in sameness. They suggest that part of your purpose can be to gradually widen the map of who you are, place by place, experience by experience. But they also leave room for honesty. There are times when you do not want to go anywhere new at all, when life already feels too uncertain and you crave nothing but a familiar chair and a predictable day. In those seasons, this quote may feel like pressure rather than promise. That does not make it untrue; it just means it is a voice that speaks loudest in the moments when you are ready, even a little bit, to walk toward the door instead of away from it.
The Era Of These Words
Diane Arbus worked and lived mostly in the middle of the twentieth century, a time when the United States was being pulled in different directions at once. After World War II, there was a strong push toward normalcy, conformity, and a certain tidy idea of success: stable jobs, neat families, clean neighborhoods. At the same time, under that surface, many people felt restless, out of place, or simply unseen. New artistic movements, social changes, and countercultures began to grow out of that tension.
Arbus became known for photographing people who did not fit easily into the polished, mainstream image of the era: people on the edges, people others often looked away from. She walked through streets, carnivals, and apartments, drawn to lives and faces that many considered strange. In that world, "My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been" made deep sense. It matched both a wider cultural curiosity and her own impulse to step outside the scripted version of American life.
The saying reflects the mood of a time when artists, thinkers, and communities were questioning what was "normal" and who got to decide that. Going where you have never been was not just about travel; it was about crossing social and emotional boundaries, daring to see what was usually hidden. These words have since been widely repeated, and while quotes can sometimes be misattributed or simplified over time, this one fits closely with the spirit of her work and the era she moved through.
About Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus, who was born in 1923 and died in 1971, was an American photographer whose work focused on people living at the edges of what her culture called ordinary. She grew up in New York City and eventually turned her attention away from commercial fashion photography toward a more personal, searching kind of work. Her portraits often showed subjects that mainstream society ignored or stared at from a distance: performers, outsiders, people whose lives did not match polite expectations.
She is remembered because her photographs did something unsettling and important: they asked viewers to really look at those they might otherwise pass by, and to feel both the strangeness and the shared humanity there. Her images were often direct, with subjects facing the camera head-on, creating a feeling of intense contact between you and the person in the frame.
This way of looking at the world connects strongly to her quote. If your favorite thing is to go where you have never been, you are willing to step into rooms, neighborhoods, and lives that society teaches you to avoid. Arbus seemed drawn to that kind of movement, not just across physical spaces but across emotional and social boundaries. Her work suggests that by going toward what you do not yet understand, you may discover not only new places and people, but also new parts of yourself.