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Secrets have power over us. Only when secrets are revealed can truth be known and freedom brought about.

I know about death…Our country is haunted by its dead, weighed down by loss and remembrance.

I would wish that I was the one leaving because that would be better than being left behind

Home is collecting stories, writing them down, and retelling them. Home is writing, and it grounds, sustains, and nourishes me. Home is the page. The one place I always, always come back to.

Whatever resolve and certainty he had felt in the past few weeks had melted away. Strangely, there was some lightness in the unknowing, like a clenched fist had been unfurled. (chapter 34)

But success in a military operation always feels short-lived. You shoulder your rifle and move on from there to the next battle.

Home became the liminal space in between-between identities, between cultures, between languages- and I was content claiming that space as my own, pleased to be different.

Leaving, I discovered, did not cure my displacement, but rather reinforced it.

You have a tendency to think of wars as being fought in arenas set aside for fighting. But when you go through these farms and little towns, you realize wars are fought in people's backyards, stores, streets, and cities. It was all so very real then. It's real to me today.

It is, after all, our imagination that makes us human. Vincent van Gogh asked, “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?” To which the answer is, I would have thought, boring, bordering on pointless.

As you can see, this plan provides many opportunities for me to die in a fiery explosion.

As a chemist, Vogel knew how to make a bomb. In fact, much of his training was to avoid making them by mistake.