“If you make every game a life-and-death thing, you’re going to have problems. You’ll be dead a lot.”

“If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you'll die a lot of times.”

“If you do what we ask you to do, the victories will belong to you, and the losses to me.”

“Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.”

“Play hard. Play smart. Play together.”

“I'm alive but I have no life. I'm alive but also dead. I'm dead and alive.”

“In a way it was like a bunch of guys in a game. They were falling behind every minute that passed, but they had lost interest in the score. It was as if they were just a ton behind and had given up on the win. And maybe deep inside they didn't want to peep the score, maybe they knew what was happening but just didn't want to think about it anymore. I could understand that. I had played enough ball in my life, and was deep enough into my game to know I had to be in the hunt for a win or I could lose who I was. And once I lost who I was, my inner me, then all the CDs and all the iPods and all the bling in the world wasn't going to make it right. The strange thing was that everybody was feeling the same thing, that there was a huge game going on, and that the game was going to decide who was a winner and who lost. But so many of the brothers on the corner didn't have a play...I could feel for them because they were just like me in most ways, thinking that everybody should have a number, everybody should have the same playing time, and knowing it wasn't going to happen.”