Dreaminess is, among other things, a state of suspended recognition, and a response to too much useless and complicated factuality. Its symptoms can be a long-term interest in the weather, or a...

I'm a verb, Frank. Verbs don't answer questions.

The longer they stayed on, and the better they knew each other, the better she at least could see their mistake, and the more misguided their lives became-like a long proof in mathematics in which the...

I knew you could know the words but not match them with the life. But to be able to do it right said something about you. And I didn't know if my judgment was good enough, or exactly what was good or...

My parents...were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.

If there's another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're over, and that has to be enough. The other view...

...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 face the possibility of...

Probably many people's vision of "thinking something through" is of this nature: you do precisely what youwant to do-if you can.

All this is a natural part of the aging process, in which you find yourself with less to do and more opportunities to eat your guts out regretting everything you have done.

How amazingly far normalcy extends; how you can keep it in sight as if you were on a raft sliding out to sea, the stitch of land growing smaller and smaller. Or in a balloon swept up on a column of...

I don't look in mirrors anymore. It's cheaper than surgery.

... that life can't be escaped and must be faced entirely.

I had more positive views. Which made me feel that although I hadn't been taught to assimilate, a person perhaps assimilated without knowing it. I was doing it now. You did it alone, and not with...

Most things dopn't stay the way they are very long.

Against these forces -- an earth rotating, a sun lowering its angle in the sky, winds filling with rain and the geese arriving -- time is just a made-up thing, and recedes in importance, and should.

Fincher was the kind of Southerner who will try to address you through a web of deep and antic southernness, and who assumes every body in earshot knows all about his parents and history and wants to...

And there are words, significant words, you do not want to say, words that account for busted-up lives, words that try to fix something ruined that shouldn't be ruined and no one wanted ruined, and...

The things you'll never do don't get decided at the end of life, but somewhere in the long gray middle, where you can't see the dim light at either end.