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

Children can be harsh judges when it comes to their parents, disinclined to grant clemency.

I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college and now he was emancipated from that world of abstraction, false security, parents, and material excess.

There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.

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.

Straddling the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently down at the vastness of Tibet.

What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?