“Neukom, the Giants' buttoned-down owner, finally found Ross and vigorously rubbed his bald head while screaming jibberish nobody could understand”

“Former Journey lead singer Steve Perry was a lifelong Giants fan who grew up in the San Joaquin Valley. When the Dodgers started showing him on the big screen during their nightly sing-along, Perry protested by sneaking out of his seats before the eighth inning began. Now the Giants were making their playoff run, and Perry had become a regular sight at AT&T park, thrashing around from a club-level suite as he spurred on the crowd.”

“Like the vain curlings of the watery maze,Which in smooth streams a sinking weight does raise,So Man, declining always, disappearsIn the weak circles of increasing years;And his short tumults of themselves compose,While flowing Time above his head does close.”

“... While much recent historicist criticism has assumed early nineteenth-century readers attuned to subtle ideological nuances in poetry, actual responses from readers often come closer to clulessness. ... It is no surprise that no one understood Blake, but other poets fared not much better. ... Coleridge's 'Christabel' was 'the standing enigma which puzzles the curiosity of literary circles. What is it all about?', while another reviewer asked about Shelley, 'What, in the name of wonder on one side, and of common sense on the other, is the meaning of this metaphysical rhapsody about the unbinding of Prometheus?'. Even Keats was condemned for 'his frequent obscurity and confusion of language' and his 'unintelligible quaintness'. Byron, never to be outdone, boasted in 'Don Juan' that not only did he not understand many of his fellow poets, he did not understand himself either: 'I don't pretend that I quite understand / My own meaning when I would be very fine.' ...”

“Love is ordinary, love is dull, love is the natural condition of the human heart, love is the message we carry branded on us from the womb but only the best of us will dare to read it and, even when we dare to read it to people who can never understand, it is still there in us like the rings in a tree or the ridges in a shell, part of us, marking the years and the drought and the growth, even if nobody sees it until the tree is cut down.”

“While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.”

“This is what works for me: I practise crop rotation with my creative endeavours. I’ve found that when the nitrogen runs out in the soil in one field, it’s best to leave it fallow for a while and cultivate another.”