“...Today the invisible hand seems confused and indecisive...Ideology and rhetoric increasingly guide policy decision, often bearing little relationship to factual reality. And the America we once knew seems divided and angry, defiantly embracing unreason.”

“What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.”

“Later, Jenny would say she seldom knew what she would take a picture of when she picked up a camera, that she only knew once she peered through the viewfinder, as if the photograph had finally found her.”

“These golf people seem unnaturally obsessed. They dress kind of funny too, and it's become a running joke for Gretchen and I to e-mail the most ridiculous golfing pictures back and forth to each other. Sometimes she adds hysterical captions. She never puts them on PitchBitch, though. We can't threaten the gravy train.”

“Among the things she said: "Women seem to possess all the natural gifts essential to a good portraitist ... such as personality, patience and intuition. The sitter ought to be the predominating factor in a successful portrait. Men portraitist are apt to forget this; they are inclined to lose the sitter in a maze of technique luxuriating in the cleverness and beauty of their own medium.”

“They looked at each other and laughed, then looked away, filled with darkness and secrecy. Then they kissed and remembered the magnificence of the night. It was so magnificent, such an inheritance of a universe of dark reality, that they were afraid to seem to remember. They hid away the remembrance and the knowledge.”

“It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.”