Laughter is a bubbly, effervescent form of holiness

... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]

Listen to your broccoli and it will tell you how to eat it.

I get to tell my truth. I get to seek meaning and realization. I get to live fully, wildly, imperfectly. That's why I'm alive. And all I actually have to offer as a writer is my version of life. Every single thing that has happened to me is mine.

Little by little, in telling Sam all these details, I got to see the bigger point of baseball, that it can give us back ourselves. We’re a crowd animal, a highly gregarious, communicative species, but the culture and the age and all the fear that fills our days have put almost everyone into little boxes, each of us all alone. But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us.

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.

Summer nearly does me in every year. It's too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long.