“A photograph it a souvenir of a memory.It is not a moment.It is the looking at the photograph that becomes the moment. Your own moment.”

“And again. I kept clicking until the photograph was demolished, until it was no more than a mosaic of gray tiles, adding up to nothing.Nothing. Because wasn’t that how I felt that day? If you zoom close—if you really get close to someone, if you really get close to yourself—then youlose the other person, you lose yourself entirely. You get so close you can’t see anything anymore. Your mind becomes all these abstract fragments.English becomes math.”

“I thought about the word 'profile' and what a weird double meaning it had. We say we're looking at a person's profile online, or say a newspaper is writing a profile on someone, and we assume it's the whole them we're seeing. But when a photographer takes a picture of a profile, you're only seeing half the face... It's never the way you would remember seeing them. You never remember someone 'in profile.' You remember them looking you in the eye, or talking to you. You remember an image that the subject could never see in a mirror, because you are the mirror. A profile, photographically, is perpendicular to the person you know.”

“If you wanted to reassemble Elijah's afternoon, you could probably do it by stringing together all the photographs and all of the frames of videotape that he walks into. Always a passerby, he is immortalized and unknown.”

“But death is not freedom. For a moment, it can look like freedom. But then it's death.Anything.Something.Nothing.”

“You existed. You existed now as a fractal.Definition:A fractal is generally a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be broken into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole.Maybe I was a fractal. Maybe the photographer was a fractal.Maybe we were all fractals.”

“It scares me how hard it is to remember life before you. I can't even make the comparisons anymore, because my memories of that time have all the depth of a photograph. It seems foolish to play games of better and worse. It's simply a matter of is and is no longer.”