“How quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound.”

“Sports contained the truth, I decided, the unspoken truth (how quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound), and it seemed hard to believe that I had never understood this before. They rewarded effortlessness and unself-consciousness; they confirmed that yes, there are rankings of skill and value and that everyone knows what they are (seeing those guys who were subbed with two seconds left before the end of a quarter, I’d think how girls’ coaches were never that heartless); they showed that the best things in the world to be were young and strong and fast. To play a great game of high school basketball-it was something I myself had never done, but I could tell-made you know what it was to be alive. How much in an adult life can compare to that? Granted, there are margaritas, or there’s no homework, but there are also puffy white bagels under neon lights in the conference room, there’s waiting for the plumber, making small talk with your boring neighbor.”

“When we teach ourselves and our children discipline, we are teaching them and ourselves how to suffer and also how to grow.”

“But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup.”

“But I was not quite with him in my thoughts, and I wonder whether that is how we got to be after living alone for a long time, that in the middle of a train of thought we start talking outloud, that the difference between talking and not talking is slowly wiped out, that the unending, inner conversations we carry on with ourselves merges with the one we have with the few people we still see, and when you live alone for too long the line which divides the one form the other becomes vague, and you do not notice when you cross that line. Is this how my future looks?”

“How we relate with other people is dependent on how we rate ourselves and what we think about ourselves.”