I was dimly aware that I might be getting in over my head. But that only added to the scheme’s appeal. That it wouldn’t be easy was the whole point.

The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.

Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.

The sad end he met in Afghanistan was more accurately a function of his stubborn idealism - his insistence on trying to do the right thing. In which case it wasn't a tragic flaw that brought Tillman down, but a tragic virtue.

Almost every magazine piece I've ever written, I felt like I haven't done it justice, like it was just a gloss.

Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence — the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes — all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.

As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane-as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout-there may be no more potent force than religion.