“Where was the woman who said she’d come. She said she would come.”
“‘I want to tell you,’ the voice on the phone said. ‘My head is filled with things to say.’”
‘“I didn’t want to especially hurt myself. Or like punish. I don’t hate myself. I just wanted out. I didn’t want to play anymore is all.’”
“‘The feeling is why I want to. The feeling is the reason I want to die. I’m here because I want to die. That’s why I’m in a room without windows and with cages over the lightbulbs and no lock on the toilet door. Why they took my shoelaces and my belt. But I notice they don’t take away the feeling do they.’”
“‘I don’t know what I could call it. It’s like I can’t get enough outside it to call it anything. It’s like horror more than sadness. It’s more like horror. It’s like something horrible is about to happen, the most horrible thing you can imagine-no,worse than you can imagine because there’s the feeling that there’s something you have to do right away to stop it but you don’t know what it is you have to do, and then it’s happening, too, the whole horrible time, it’s about to happen and also it’s happening, all at the same time.’”
“The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself.”
“You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned over and over again.”
“junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem: life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without.”
“But then is battling and vanquishing the self the same as destroying yourself?”
“What’s the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end?”
“This (the sunset) more resembled an explosion. It took place above and behind him, and he turned some of the time to regard it; it (the sunset) was swollen and perfectly round, and large, radiating knives of light when he squinted. It hung and trembled slightly like a vicious drop about to fall. It hung just above the Tortolita hills behind him (Marthae), and slowly was sinking.”
“Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn't even know he believes until it exits his mouth in front of five anxious little hairless plump trusting clueless faces.”
“‘Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of us tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.’”
“‘Make amusement all you wish. But choose with care. You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice. You, M. Hugh Steeply: you would die without thinking for what?’”
‘“We’re all on each other's food chain. All of us. It’s an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We’re each deeply alone here. It’s what we all have in common, this aloneness’
‘E Unibus Pluram,’ Ingersnoll muses.”
“‘because you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus, so there’s like radical improvement up to a certain plateau and then what looks like a stall, on the plateau, with the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb up to the next one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.”
“Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself.”
“But that’s not the way I… that’s not the way a real player plays. With respect and due effort and care for every point. You want to be great, near-great, you give every ball everything. And then some. You concede nothing. Even against loxes. You play right up to your limit and then pass your limit and look back at your former limit and wave a hankie at it, embarking.”
“ Afraid to give my last talent the one shot it demanded. Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever. Use it or lose it, he’d say over the newspaper. I’m…I’m just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN. It’s… potential may be worse than none, Jim.Than no talent to fritter in the first place, lying guzzling because I haven’t the balls to… God I’m I’m so sorry. Jim. You don’t deserve to see me like this. I’m so scared, Jim. I’m so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand? Can you see I was giving it all I had? That I was in there, out there in the heat, listening, webbed with nerves?”
“I’ve seen your long shadow grotesquely backlit at the top of the house’s stairs I helped pay for, boy: how the drunk and the maimed both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether.”
“That the people to be most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened.”
“That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.”
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
“You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.”
“‘The burning doesn’t go away?’ ‘What fire dies when you feed it?’”
“‘So I’m stuck in the cafe from either side. Fame or torture envy of fame. There’s no way out.’ ‘You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.’”
“He leans in more toward Gately and shouts that the one he was talking about was: this wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, ‘What the fuck is water?’ and swim away.”
“Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad, or health-care surtaxes, or the hazards of annular fusion: nobody but Luddite granola-crunching freaks would call bad what no one can imagine being without.”
“ But on that one night he seemed to be the piece of string by which I hung suspended over hell itself.”
“Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror , the fire’s flames: when the flame gets close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
“Out the right to the north over lots of different lights is the red rotating tip of the WYYY transmitter , its spin’s ring of red reflected in the visible Charles River , the Charles tumid with rain and snowmelt , illuminated in patches by headlights on Memorial and the Storrow 500 , the river unwinding , swollen and humped, its top a mosaic of oil rainbows and dead branches, gulls asleep or brooding, bobbing, head under wing.”
“‘Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there’s simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.’
‘But then how do you know they're monsters, then?’
‘That's the monstrosity right there, Boo, I'm starting to think.’
‘Golly Ned.’”
“The truth will set you free, but not until it's done with you.”