Nothing in the world is as hopeful as knowing a woman you like is somewhere thinking about only you. Conversely, there is no badness anywhere as acute as the badness of no woman out in the world...

For now let me say only this: if sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later...

For writers - even sportswriters - bad news is always easier than good, since it is, after all, more familiar.

It's odd how our fears, the ones we didn't know we had, alter our sight line and make us see things that never were.

Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due.

Meeting a girl, falling in love, marrying her, moving to Connecticut, buying a fucking house, starting a life with her and thinking you really knew anything about her--the last part was a complete...

No words came out of me. Words can also be the feeblest emissaries for our feelings.

And there is no nicer time on earth than now-everything in the offing, nothing gone wrong, all potential-the very polar opposite of how I felt driving home the other night, when everything was on the...

to sit in the empty stands of a Florida ball park and hear the sounds of glove leather and chatter;

First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.

Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing's worth doing unless it has the potential of to fuck up...

It's odd how a piece of ground can hold so little of its meaning; though that's lucky, since for it to do so would make places sacred but impenetrable, whereas they're otherwise neither.

I don't, after all, know what's wrong with him, am not even certain anything is, or that wrong isn't just a metaphor for something else, which may itself already be a metaphor. Though probably what's...

A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing seems is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain.

He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express.

I was born into an ordinary, modern existence in 1945, an only child to decent parents of no irregular point of view, no particular sense of their place in history's continuum, just two people afloat...

It's hard to go through life without killing someone.

...good counsel: generosity, longevity, acceptance, relinquishment, letting the world come to me -- and, with these things to make a life.