p. 17 And his smile fell from his face like ice cream off a little kid's cone.
p. 64 His dad's an up-and-coming preacher, so Micah spends his whole life stuck in church camps, church schools, church basements. And since all he hears there is how good and holy the Church is and how cruel and filthy the Outside World is, and since he hates his good and holy basement life, he assumes he'd rather be in the Outside World, and so tries to prove how much he knows about it - by acting cruel and talking filthy.
p. 125 ...the reason my father did not wax lyrical about warm spring nights or baseball fever was that he wasn't the poet, he was the topic. Papa didn't present the case for baseball, he represented it, and to stand in front of him wondering if the scent of mown grass and plum blossoms made him think of baseball was like asking a bloodstained man with a fly rod and ten dead trout on a stringer if he ever thought about fishing.
p. 152 There are, as far as I can tell, just two types of people who can bear to watch baseball without talking: total non-baseball fans and hard-core players. The hard-core player can watch in silence because his immersion is so complete that he feels no need to speak, while the persona non baseball can do it because his ignorance is so vast that he sees nothing worthy of comment. For the rest of us, watching any sort of baseball-like proceeding without discussing what we're seeing is about as much fun as drinking non-alcoholic beer while fishing without a hook.
p. 179 "You boys are four very different animals, and the older you get, the more unalike you'll get. So I want you to start respecting your differences here and now."
p. 181 "She wants to share her heaven with her kids. Do you understand? She wants the best for you, but gets it mixed up at times with what was once best for her. So it's hard for her to stand back. Hard to let go. Hard to let you each seek your own sorts of heavens. Understand?"
p. 227: In a head-on collision with Fanatics, the real problem is always the same: how can we possibly behave decently toward people so arrogantly ignorant that they believe, first, that they possess Christ's power to bestow salvation, second, that forcing us to memorize and regurgitate a few of their favorite Bible phrases and attend their church is that salvation, and third, that any discomfort, frustration, anger, or disagreement we express in the face of their moronic barrages is due not to their astounding effrontery but to our sinfulness? ... Another Austrian, novelist Heimito von Doderer, put it this way: "Even the most impossible persons who do the most unforgivable things possess substantial reality; from their points of view they are always right - for let them doubt that and they are no longer such impossible persons. And we must pay close heed to those who play such ungrateful roles, for these roles are indispensable. It is no small thing to be a monster or a spiteful idiot, and in the first case to think oneself beautiful, in the second a highly intelligent person. Such characters must be represented. Someone has to do it."
p. 270 One of the great charms of professional baseball used to be that it provided us statistics-lovers with a kind of Mathematical Wildlife Refuge - a nationwide network of painstakingly calibrated and manicured playing fields wherein statistics could frolic about unmolested, appearing to those of us who admired them to possess accurate, consistent, and at times even mythic meanings.
p. 276 Thus did my siblings and I learn one of the hard lessons of life: the best way to strip the allure and dreaminess from a lifelong dream is, very often, simply to have it come true.
p. 304 Obviously, I question his calculations: to slough off half a self in hopes of finding a whole one is not my idea of good math.
p. 319 (Dr. Gurtzner:) "What no social, political, or religious problem will ever manage to take into account is the people's inevitable love and reverence for what mankind really does hold in common. The earth and the hearth fire. The rivers and sky. The richness and complexity of human relationships, and of the changing seasons. The divinity they believe infuses it all. This is why revolutions begin with justifiable unrest, and may rise to open rebellion, but also why, after turning to violence, they rapidly begin to subside."
p. 320 (Dr. Gurtzner:) "Anyone too undisciplined, too self-righteous, or too self-centered to live in the world as it is has a tendency to 'idealize' a world which ought to be. But no matter what political or religious direction such 'idealists' choose, their visions always share one telling charecteristic: in their utopias, heavens, or brave new worlds, their greatest personal weakness suddenly appears to be a strength. In a 'religiously pure' community, for example, any puritanical blockhead who was unable to love his neighbor or turn the other cheek can suddenly sweep the entire world into the category of 'Damned' and pass himself off as 'Saved.' Similarly, in Mr. Chance's revolutionary army, the rudeness and petulance of a mere spoiled brat can suddenly pass itself off as passionate concern for Vietnamese peasants or the black Southern poor."
p. 322 (Dr. Gurtzner:) "What I would wish for the so-called Counterculture is that it be more than a disenfranchised tribe whose sole rite of initiation is disillusionment with the existing culture, as symbolized by one's parents, the Pentagon, and the Ku Klux Klan. I would wish that its members accept neither my tweed coat nor Mr. Chance's knee patches as a sign of authority, but judge us both by the cogency of our thoughts. I would wish that rather than fancy itself 'counter' to the culture, its compassionate ideas would take root in the land and people, and begin to transform them both. But if Mr. Chance does in fact speak for his 'culture,' I fear this breath of fresh air, this grass-roots movement in which even old men like myself have placed such hope, will soon become an empty excuse for youthful effrontery, a faddish cloak for self-indulgence and drug dealers, and a primary cause of a fascistic political and cultural backlash."
p. 329 The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately, or in the long run. - Henry David Thoreau
p. 346 "You call hellfire a virtue?" Hank roared in rebuttal. "I call hellfire a threat," Natasha said, "and 'love thy neighbor' a value. But I believe in hell, or something close to it. I think hell is what we get right here on earth when people trade their spiritual and political values in on spiritual and political threats."
p. 429 There are kinds of human problems which really do seem, as our tidy expressions would have it, to "come to a head" and "demand to be dealt with." But there are also problems, often just as serious, which come to nothing that we can recognize or openly deal with. Some long-lived, insidious problems simply slip us off to one side of ourselves. Some gently rob us of just enough energy or faith so that days which once took place on a horizontal plane become an endless series of uphill slogs. And some - like high water working year after year at the roots of a riverside tree - quietly undercut our trust or our hope, our sense of place, or of humor, our ability to empathize, or to feel enthused, and we don't sense impending danger, we don't feel the damage at all, till one day, to our amazement, we find ourselves crashing to the ground. Peter had one of these kinds of problems.
p. 432 (Everett:) "But there's always something missing. Having things missing, even indispensible things, is a fact of life, don't you think? And life goes on anyhow. Except for the missing parts. Which were indispensable, so of course it goes on all out of whack."
p. 466 Then, by accident, [Everett] glanced too high, and noticed that his buttercups had also begun to list. They were no longer standing the way he'd stood them, no longer engaged in the glorious basking that overwhelmed him on the headland. They were leaning toward the light now, craning toward it. He'd been dead wrong about the blitheness. The buttercups now seemed to know - to understand with that purely physical knowledge that all living things possess - that something was wrong. Their craning was like a cry: they were calling out with all the body language they possessed for a life or a place they had no minds with which to remember. Confused by the intensity of his feelings, Everett tried to defy them: he gave the can a half twist, spinning the blossoms away from the window, then stepped outside and went about his morning chores.
p. 515 And when the night breeze eased into the spruces, when he heard the big trees begin to pronounce the nine-hour-long word that meant Warm Full-Mooned Spring Night, even another instant of waiting was suddenly unthinkable.
p. 516 But I finally concluded that it is an inalienable right of lovers everywhere to become temporarily worthless to the world.
p. 517 I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G. Q. Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it's so damned interesting. It takes hard effort, skill, love, and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life. The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself, according to Gale, is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery, and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness. But baseball, he says, is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace. Hence G. Q.'s thesis that pro ballplayers - little as some of them may want to hear it - are basically just a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working hard and artfully to prevent wars, by making peace more interesting.
p. 621 Because what is an offering, really? What can human beings actually give to God? What can they give to each other even? And what sorts of receptacle can contain these gifts? Work camps and insane asylums, Indian trains and church pews, bullpens and little blue boxes ... Who belongs in what? When do they belong there? Who truly gives what to whom? These were questions we were all struggling to answer not in words, but with our lives.
p. 641 [Peter's] experience of the inner life, he tells the kids, is more like a blind man learning to get around a dark but beautiful city with one of those long, sensitive canes. Going into wilderness alone is simply a way of getting your cane.
Too long to quote: pp. 210-211, p. 380, p. 625
