The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.

Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.

American energy. . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism

What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -