“Randy young couples in Naples don’t even bother with lovers’ lanes they simply park on any street and paste the windows with newspaper. A daughter with an encyclopaedic knowledge of current affairs is not something a Neapolitan father brags about. To ensure the undivided attentions of their partner some men prefer to paste the windows with the sports newspaper. Maybe that’s why La Gazzetta dello Sport is pink—to enhance the mood.”

“Every daydream that involves the past sports in its hatband a ticket to the grave.”

“Baseball, more than any other sport, has a magical way of connecting fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren and ancestors back down the line. - From The Brooklyn Nine”

“Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps.”

“The feeling, the irrepressible yearning to return, suddenly reveals to her the existence of the past, the power of the past, of her past; in the house of her life there are windows now, windows opening to the rear, onto what she has experienced; from now on her existence will be inconceivable without these windows.”

“-why had she found the story so absorbing? Of course it was quite possible she hadn't. Maybe she merely preferred a novel--any novel--to reading a newspaper or chatting with the girls she worked with all day. And maybe she always read like that--with an air of having surrendered totally to a spell.”