But in a story I can steal her soul.

Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones - THAT kind of love.

... when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved.

Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.

The presence of danger has a way of making you feel fully awake.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rusack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.