Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

To the militant, identity is everything.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)

Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's.

To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance.

With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence.

If you blend in, you don't stand out.

The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.

Often I'll find clues to where the story might go by figuring out where the characters would rather not go.

Intending to run ahead of everyone is not an obstacle to fall behind. Streets are full of liars.

I believe things happen that can't be explained, but so many people seem intent on explaining them. Everyone has an answer for them. Either aliens or things from the spirit world.

If I could start my life all over again, I would be a professional football player, and you damn well better believe I would be a Pittsburgh Steeler.

When someone you love dies, you don't lose them all at once. You lose them in pieces over time, like how the mail stops coming.

The belief that married-couple families are superior is probably the most pervasive prejudice in the Western world.

A huge amount still needs to be done. At the moment hundreds of children are still malnourished.

He on whom heaven confers a sceptre knows not the weight till he bears it.