“Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. ... We may wish it were not so, but action amounts to identity. We become what we do.”

“You can overcome the things that are done to you, but you cannot escape the things that you have done. Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. The soldiers who don't die for us come home again. They bring with them the killers they became on our national behalf, and sit with their polluted memories and broken emotions in our homes and schools and temples. We may wish it were not so, but action amounts to identity. We become what we do.You can tell yourself all the stories you want, but you can't leave your actions over there. You can't build a wall and expect to live on the other side of memory. All of the poison seeps back into our soil.”

“Zelda Fitzgerald, languishing in an asylum, drew a picture of a salamander and wrote: "I believed I was a salamander, and it seems I am nothing but an impediment." We have all tried to be salamanders, but nobody really survives the fire. The mystery is that some get burned worse than others; some get burned in ways that are liveable, and some do not.”

“Actually is a word that has been degraded to adornment and punctuations, but it has a meaning too: it means right now, while we are on it.”

“The sea pokes the horizon like the tongue of a parched man, blue corroded by salt.”

“The Bible was written by man to serve his own ends. Like society. Like the church. We use such things to control one another, but what right do we have to do so?”

“I didn't emerge from the cocoon of my past to become an uninhibited, emotionally healthy butterfly. Nothing is ever that easy. Sometimes grief is a comfort we grant ourselves because it's less terrifying than trying for joy. Nobody wants to admit it. We'd all declare we want to be happy, if we could. So why, then, is pain the one thing we most often hold on to? Why are slights and griefs the memories on which we choose to dwell? Is it because joy doesn't last but grief does?”