“In the end no matter who you are, or who you were the only thing you'll never lose are the memories you have made..”

“I've wanted to win at everything, every day, since I was a kid. And time doesn't change a person, it just helps you get a handle on who you are. Even at age 41, I still hate losing--I'm just more gracious about it. I'm also aware that setbacks have an upside; they fuel new dreams.”

“If you're black, you got to look at America a little bit different. You got to look at America like the uncle who paid for you to go to college, but who molested you.”

“His dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body and the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, and worst of all, the bottomless pit of truth that he had suddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come was not an afterlife at all, but simply this world, to come- the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it.”

“Photography is an itch that wont go away. No matter how much you scratch it.”

“Because once you're born you might feel all of those things," Boris was saying. "In any order. And you can't control it." Daniel looked up, but Boris had turned away from him, his eyes staring at the ground. He held him tighter. "Maybe it will never happen," Boris said, and blinked. "I hope it never will. But if it does, I want you to be prepared.”

“or is that too straightforward a statement, have I been insuffi­ciently artful in encoding my sentiments...in camouflaging them for esthetic effect. well, too fucking bad...my life has convinced me of few things, but the absoluteness of the negative is one of them... light bends, it diffracts, it scatters, but darkness fucking endures... it is what remains when the strayed-in rays and scintillas have long disappeared... it is the fundament, the ground... and I am one who can tell you this: behold my black body..”