It seemed there was no end at all to the lies a person could tell, once she got started.

...and the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood.

You can't stop time. You can't capture light. You can only turn your face up and let it rain down.

Lately, the world felt fragile, like a blown egg, as if it might shatter beneath a careless touch.

My first job was in a nursing home - a terrible place in retrospect. It was in an old house, and the residents were so lonely. People rarely visited them. I only stayed there a couple of months, but it made a strong impression on me.

The city of Pittsburgh gleaming suddenly before her . . . so startling in its vastness and its beauty that she had gasped and slowed, afraid of losing control of the car

He carried Paul inside and up the stairs. He gave him a drink of water and the orange chewable aspirin he like and sat with him on the bed, holding his hand...This was what he yearned to capture on film: these rare moments where the world seemed unified, coherent, everything contained in a single fleeting image. A spareness that held beauty and hope and motion - a kind of silvery poetry, just as the body was poetry in blood and flesh and bone.