“The body is soft, beautiful, vulnerable. It’s easy to threaten it. It’s easy to harm it. It takes next to nothing to cause pain, to draw blood, to break bones. Takes next to nothing to blast a body to bits. It’s much harder to protect it, she says, and much more important.”

“Words are too easy,” he says. He opens his book. “What looks like truth and sounds like truth might be nothing but a dream, nothing but a story I wish had happened.”

“She points at my chest.“And much more interestingly, what’s that?”“Blood,” I say.She gets her camera out.”

“What is is?’‘I don’t know. I don’t even know if it’s true or if it’s a dream.’‘That’s alright. Truth and Dreams are always getting muddled.”

“Anyone can take a picture of poverty; it’s easy to focus on the dirt and hurt of the poor. It’s much harder—and much more needful—to pry under that dirt and reveal the beauty and dignity of people that, but for their birth into a place and circumstance different from our own, are just like ourselves. I want my images to tell the story of those people and to move us beyond pity to justice and mercy.”

“I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it’s possible to be. I’m growing and I don’t know how to grow. I’m living but I haven’t started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it’s like I’m not here in the world at all and I simply don’t exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.”

“Trust is the base for all relations. If it breaks, then it’s not easy to rejoin. It’s very easy to say ‘I don’t trust you’, but the pain these words cause is immense.”