“Christmas is the keeping-place for memories of our innocence.”

“Time dims memory. But not that kind. Somewhere in a corner of the brain, one little cell never forgets. It keeps the song that, heard again, recreates the room, the person, the moment. It preserves the phrase or the laugh or the gesture that resurrects a friend long gone. It knows precisely where you were and what you were doing when you heard about Pearl Harbor if you're old enough, or Kennedy's assassination, or Martin Luther King's, or the Challenger explosion. Every detail is frozen in memory, despite all the years. It keeps the innocuous question, too. The question that sometime later, when all the synapses are working, produces the epiphany, the moment when you're driving along and you realize that finally you understand. And why did it take you so long?”

“As I let go of the rope, a familar shot of pure joy surged through me at being part of the river, of this wild place. ”

“Tears can be good. They can cleanse us form our misery.”

“Your face is bright with the love of the Lord. Our souls are singing together, despite the evil that threatens to befall us.”

“It's interesting how a random event can change our lives in ways that would be impossible to imagine, isn't it?”

“He had not understood that we were combat photographers, and our jobs were as relevant and justifiable—or as irrelevant and unjustifiable—as anyone’s in Vietnam.”