“When you live next to death ... you don't think about it anymore, you just try to encounter it as seldom as possible.”

“When I came home, I was asked to put my pictures in a photo exhibit at the Cinematography College ... my pictures won first prize. I began to ask myself what I was doing, and why. A few months after the exhibit, I dropped out of college, left my wife and began to write this book.”

“We stayed here for only a few hours. We rested and went on. But the camera snatched this fraction of a second from the eternal flow of time and froze it forever. At this moment we didn’t know that in a few hours we would fall into an ambush. At this moment, while we were filling our canteens from the stream, we didn’t yet know that we would stay in the mountains for three days without a drop of water. We didn’t yet know anything …”

“When you live next to death ... you don't think about it anymore, you just try to encounter it as seldom as possible.”

“Someone once said that a minesweeper makes only two mistakes: the first is when he decides to be one. The second …”

“There's nothing I can do to erase the shadow of misery and despair from the eyes looking back at me from the photos [that I took in Afghanistan].”

“We didn’t believe in tomorrow. We we couldn’t forget what had happened yesterday.”

“Once, back home, I decided to count how many days out of my twenty months in Afghanistan I’d been on combat missions. 217 days. And I’m still paying the price for every one of those days.”