Peter Loewen

Satchel Paige's six rules for life:

1. Avoid fried meats, which angry up the blood;
2. If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts;
3. Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move;
4. Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain't restful.
5. Avoid running at all times.
6. Don't look back, something may be gaining on you. 

"Small, my girl, oh small, small, small. You see? The world shrinks around us: we give it all up for you. We close our eyes to it, we shutter them, we give it away though it is not ours to give. For you we give up the world."

"The private sanctum of the mind . . . he fell back on it gratefully. What a freedom it was, what a perfect freedom. In the future, if he felt lonely, he would have to remember this, remind himself of its benefits— the unending and sweet privacy of thinking. How no one else, no matter how great or powerful, could ever enter here. This place was truly his. Doubt had to be a requisite of the private mind. It was a perk of being human: your mind was your own, always and forever a secret territory. "

"He was a surplus human, a product of a swollen civilization. He was a widget among men."

"The second thing he had learned, on this trip: drink more. He should drink more, in general. Not to the point of alcoholism, but enough to float, in the waning part of the day, in a kind of pleasant and light liquid, a beery amber light. Life was better that way. People were softer around the edges, their conversation less grating. "

"Time was not in step with humans, in the end. It went too fast and too slow: and yet people expected it to guide them and shelter them. "

"I was born then because it was true, as soon as you existed, that I only existed to care about you. From then on I myself was nothing.  And you know what, sweet girl? I was happy that way. “It was you who made me necessary,” he said."

"And if he did ever see it, if he ever caught a glimpse of this passing soul, it was because she let him: she let him see the world was full of hurt things. The world was made up of these shifting beings, of glancing pain between them as they moved—these solitary worlds that inhabited the total, the millions of small worlds that made up the host. That was where the pain came from, he thought, it came from the friction between worlds, the brushing past, the shiver of contact—the touch of feeling and unfeeling. The pain and grace of the temporary."

Playing shortstop: "3.   There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being. 33.   Do not confuse the first and third stages. Thoughtless being is attained by everyone, the return to thoughtless being by a very few."

"They smiled when they were behind, and when they were ahead they looked pensive and slightly sad. Their team name was the Holy Poets."

"Had he learned— would he ever learn— to discard the thoughts he could not use? It remained an open question, how much sympathy love could stand."

"...you always lived in your head and you had to go with what you felt."

"The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not. "

"...there was always something frighteningly aloof in his eyes, like a soloist so at one with the music he can’t be reached. You can’t follow me here, those mild blue eyes seemed to say. You’ll never know what this is like."

"When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?"

"But people didn’t forgive you for doing what felt right— that was the last thing they forgave you for."

"People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite."

"What you see is all there is."

"Subjects' unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular."

"To hate someone, you don't have to speak his language."

"Meanwhile, someone at the crossroads was shouting that they'd been betrayed. It's always the same. When you fail at something, you try to blame someone else for your incompetence."

"That doesn't seem too hard."
"On the contrary, it's highly dangerous. If you're discovered in Paris, we'll have to pretend we don't know you. Which means you'll be shot. And if the Prussians find out you're a double agent, they'll kill you, though by less lawful means. In this whole business you have, let's say, a fifty percent chance of saving your skin."
"And if I don't accept?"
"You'd have a one percent chance."
"Why not zero?"
"Because of your swordstick . . . But don't count on it too much."