“Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them.”

“His eyes sparkled again, and in that instant I felt a strong urge to get up and leave him behind. I had been wrong to think what Sean and I had was special. He wasn’t ‘the one’. He couldn’t be. ‘The one’ would never leave me behind.”

“They both laughed and drank to each other; they had never tasted sweeter liquor in all their lives. And in that moment they fell so deeply in love that their hearts would never be divided. So the destiny of Tristram and Isolde was ordained.”

“There is history the way Tolstoy imagined it, as a great, slow-moving weather system in which even tsars and generals are just leaves before the storm. And there is history the way Hollywood imagines it, as a single story line in which the right move by the tsar or the wrong move by the general changes everything. Most of us, deep down, are probably Hollywood people. We like to invent “what if” scenarios--what if x had never happened, what if y had happened instead?--because we like to believe that individual decisions make a difference: that, if not for x, or if only there had been y, history might have plunged forever down a completely different path. Since we are agents, we have an interest in the efficacy of agency.”

“Polite conversationalists leave no mark save the scars upon the Earth that could have been prevented had they stood their ground.”

“All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.”