...the horror of the images impossible to connect with the child he'd just left.

The child saw things that were too evident, too obvious for the trained eye.

I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.

It was queer how sometimes a child's innocent eyes can see things that grown men are blind to.

Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.

Looking at these photographs, I know that I will never understand the world I live in or fully know the places I've been. I've learned for sure only what I don't know - and how much I have to learn.

...eyes that, like those of children, look at an eternal present without forgiveness.

She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like but don't. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?

A mythological image that has to be explained to the brain is not working.

I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.

I have an undeveloped photographic memory.

No doubt, too, that even his restless-minded, introspective, self-conscious children who knew him best were much too ignorant of the world and of human nature to suspect how rare and complete was the model before their eyes.

There's something uncomfortable about looking at pictures of your parents at a time when they made each other happy.