Favorite quotes from the book: 

"I tend to agree with the theory that if you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the late time you recalled it." p. xii-xiii

"Part of the artist's job is to make the commonplace singular, to project a different interpretation onto the conventional." p. 153

"These days I am more interested in photographing things either to understand what they mean in my life or to illustrate a concept." p. 283

"I remember Dorothy Allison saying once that if you don't break out in a sweat of fear when you write, you have not gone far enough." p. 289

"Here we may be confronting another of photography's treacheries over and above the medium's power to displace real memories." p. 307

Letter from her father, Robert Munger: 
    "We are perennially reminded that art is prophetic... and that some of our best modern works of art are those in which world- or self- dissolution is represented. 
    So perhaps it is not too much out of line to indulge in the prophesy and hope that there may arise a truly vital germ of creative art which will generate, in the midst of the constant treat of death, a will to endure, and which will: 1) lend strength and vitality to a more meaningful kind of life, and 2) emphasize and strengthen the life conserving processes of civilization." 

Mann's response:
    "Am I suggesting here that I was born to redeem my father's lost artistic vision, the child destined to make the art that he was unable to make, to peer behind some of those ten thousand doors? 
    Maybe I am, and maybe I was. God knows I have tried." p. 398