“A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh, the shape of nose and mouth, and yet we protest, This isn't me.”

“One cancels the other, and yet without one, the other is incomplete. In the first photograph, standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else’s dreams. In the second, we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home.”

“A story isn't like a smoothly running engine, but is rather like a photograph. Photos can never be a perfect representation of what an eye looking at the same subject will see, partially due to the limitations of lenses and emulsions, but largely due to the conscious choice of the photographer.”

“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.”

“That becomes clear if you try to define the objects and things which supervene in each class. Odd and even, straight and curved, number, line, and shape can be defined without change but flesh, bone, and man cannot. They are like sbub nose, not like curved.”

“The cast of Hamlet had not moved much. They had that haunted yet hopeful look in their eyes, like the ones you see in photographs of people crammed into steerage compartments, traveling to some new, unknown land.”