“Heat radiated off Henry's face. Salty snot ran down his upper lip. A majestic fart propelled him to the top of Section 12, just at the springing of the stadium's curve. He slapped the sign as if high-fiving a teamate. It gave back a game shudder. He was crusing now, darkness be damned, stripping off his sweatshirt and his long underwear top without breaking stride.”

“Owen," Henry said excitedly, "I think Coach wants you to hit for Meccini."Owen closed The Voyage of the Beagle, on which he had recently embarked. "Really?""Runners on first and second," Rick said. "I bet he wants you to bunt.""What's the bunt sign?""Two tugs on the left earlobe," Henry told him. "But first he has to give the indicator, which is squeeze the belt. But if he goes to his cap with either hand or says your first name, that's the wipe-off, and then you have to wait and see whether--""Forget it," Owen said. "I'll just bunt.”

“Why would anyone want to fight Henry?" Loondorf looked hurt."Because he's a ballplayer.""So?""So he's a baller. He's got cash, chains, crisp clothes. He's got a hat that says Yankees and it's the real deal, yo. He didn't buy it at no yard sale. He walks into a bar and girls are like damn. Dudes get jealous. They want to get in his face, prove they're somebody.""They want to take down the man," Steve said helpfully.”

“There’s so much standing around,’ Owen said when Henry asked him what he liked about the game. ‘And pockets in the uniforms.”

“Schartz would never live in a world so open. His would always be occluded by the fact that his understanding and his ambition outstripped his talent. He'd never be as good as he wanted to be, not at baseball, not at football, not at reading Greek or taking the LSAT. And beyond all that he'd never be as _good_ as he wanted to be. He'd never found anything inside himself that was really good and pure, that wasn't double-edged, that couldn't just as easily become its opposite. He had tried and failed to find that thing and he would continue to try and fail, or else he would leave off trying and keep on failing. He had no art to call his own. He knew how to motivate people, manipulate people, move them around, this was his only skill. He was like a minor Greek god you've barely heard of, who sees through the glamour of the armor and down into the petty complexity of each soldier's soul. And in the end is powerless to bring about anything resembling his vision. The loftier, arbitrary gods intervene.”

“Locker rooms, in Schwartz's experience, were always underground, like bunkers and bomb shelters. This was less a structural necessity than a symbolic one. The locker room protected you when you were most vulnerable: just before a game, and just after (And halfway through, if the game was football) Before the game, you took off the uniform you wore to face the world and you put on the one you wore to face your opponent. In between you were naked in every way. After the game ended, you couldn't carry your game-time emotions out into the world - you'd be put in an asylum if you did - so you went underground and purged them. You yelled and threw things and pounded on your locker, in anguish or joy. You hugged your teammate, or bitched him out, or punched him in the face. Whatever happened, the locker room remained a haven.”

“Henry had never felt so happy. Freshperson year had been one thing, an adventure, an exhilaration, all in all a success, but it had also been exhausting, a constant struggle and adjustment and tumult. Now he was locked in. Every day that summer had the same framework, the alarm at the same time, meals and workouts and shifts and SuperBoost at the same times, over and over, and it was that sameness, that repetition, that gave life meaning. He savored the tiny variations, the incremental improvements--tuna fish on his salad instead of turkey; tow extra reps on the bench press. Every move he made had purpose.”