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.

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

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

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.

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

What could be more encouraging than realizing that Jesus calls the unqualified?

If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.

Don't tell people your dreams, show them.

I don’t think the objective of an abortion clinic is to try to talk women out of having the procedure. That obviously would not be positive for their bottom line.

The people have now come to realize that the only way to deal with the oppressor is to deal on our own terms and this was done.

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.

There are some writers who also enjoy being authors, and are good at it as well. There is nothing performative about writing, but there is about being a writer.

Power people are generally threatened by authority people.

My father used to take off his belt and give me a crack. And I'm all right.

What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.