No matter that they had been together for years, always a feeling of formality when they first saw each other again, even if the separation had been only hours. It had something to do with the attention [he] paid to her – the fact that he never too...
Why did someone fall in love with you because you were one thing, and then want you to be something else?
What was the point of living through history if you didn't record it?
She had always assumed that her life would end inside the war, that the war itself would be her eternal present, as it was for Darrow and for her brother. The possibility of time going on, her memories growing dim, the photographs of the battles turn...
This is what happened when one left one's home - pieces of oneself scattered all over the world, no one place ever completely satisfied, always a nostalgia for the place left behind. Pieces of her in Vietnam, some in this place of bone. She brought t...
Helen's Saigon had always been about selling - chickens, information, or lovely young women, it didn't matter. It had once been called the Pearl of the Orient, but by people who had not been there in a very long time. Saigon had never been Paris, but...
[They] believed that the worst way to die, was far from home. That one’s soul traveled the earth, lost forever. But this place was as much her home as [California]. She had lived out some of the most important parts of her life here – and if that...
Pictures could not be accessories to the story -- evidence -- they had to contain the story within the frame; the best picture contained a whole war within one frame.
Clear now that she was as dependent as any addict on the drug of the war. He had underestimated the damage in her.
A woman sees war differently.
Saigon in utter darkness this last night of the war. A gestating monster. Her letter to Linh had been simple: I love you more than life, but I had to see the end.
She consoled herself with the thought that the pictures were graphic enough to shake people up, stop them being complacent about what was happening, and if that meant the war would end sooner, those two deaths weren't in vain. As she hoped, with less...
She did not think it was true that women fell in love all at once, but rather, that they fell in love through repitition, just the way someone became brave.
