“What was the point of living through history if you didn't record it?”

“Helen didn't yet understand that conjuring up the future was the duty of the living, what they owed to the dead.”

“She had broken, become something else. She didn't know what yet. Could you love someone in the process of changing? She did love Linh. As much as a ghost loved. The mind treacherous.”

“[They] believed that the worst way to die, was far from home. That one’s soul traveled the earth, lost forever. But this place was as much her home as [California]. She had lived out some of the most important parts of her life here – and if that didn’t qualify a place as home, what did?”

“She had always assumed that her life would end inside the war, that the war itself would be her eternal present, as it was for Darrow and for her brother. The possibility of time going on, her memories growing dim, the photographs of the battles turning from life into history terrified her.”

“She did not think it was true that women fell in love all at once, but rather, that they fell in love through repitition, just the way someone became brave.”

“Long ago she had become more ambitious than feeling. She had fallen in love with images instead of living things. Except for Linh.”