To be a writer you have to write -- and no academic degree is going to do the writing for you.

But there's no emergency kit for marriage. No neat plan you can turn to when the ground shifts beneath your feet.

It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character.

A story, after all, does not only belong to the one who is telling it. It belongs, in equal measure, to the one who is listening.

...You find a way, somehow to get through the most horrible things, things you think would kill you. You find a way and you move through the days, one by one, in shock, in despair, but you move. The days pass, one after the other, and you go along with them - occasionally stunned, and not entirely relieved, to find that you are still alive.

I have a hunch that our obsession with photography arises from an unspoken pessimism; it is our nature to believe the good things will not last. . . But photos provide a false sense of security> like our flawed memory, they are guaranteed to fade. . . . We take photographs in order to remember, but it is in the nature of a photograph to forget (pg 157)

We take pictures because we can't accept that everything passes, we can't accept that the repetition of a moment is an impossibility. We wage a monotonous war against our own impending deaths, against time that turns children into that other, lesser species: adults. We take pictures because we know we will forget. We will forget the week, the day, the hour. We will forget when we were happiest. We take pictures out of pride, a desire to have the best of ourselve preserved. We fear that we will die and others will not know we lived.