“She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life's little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together.”

“What if Sam's heart got broken again? As with most kids who are fourteen, it has been spackled and duct-taped and caulked back together many times as it is. [p. 258]”

“She slept deeply, but as usual, she did not dream. It had been months; none of them was dreaming anymore. [p. 227]”

“Rosie [her teenage daughter] had a secret life now, was putting together her own tribe, finding her identity there, and it was great to see, and it hurt like hell.”

“Little by little, in telling Sam all these details, I got to see the bigger point of baseball, that it can give us back ourselves. We’re a crowd animal, a highly gregarious, communicative species, but the culture and the age and all the fear that fills our days have put almost everyone into little boxes, each of us all alone. But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us.”

“And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore.”

“She said to go ahead and feel the feelings. I did. They felt like shit.”