In baseball, when you get into the batter's box, that's it. It's just you. It's one man against the world. All that matters in that moment is your individual achievement and your individual skill. There is literally nothing that anyone else on your team can do for you. Hell, they're all sitting on the bench, waiting to see what happens, just like the fans in the crowd! It's just you and your bat. And the ball.

What was the opposite of linkage blindness? What described being certain of something without any kind of evidence?...The term was faith.

One time you told me that the opposite of love isn't hate. And I didn't understand that, but I think I do know. Because if you hate someone, you most still care, right? You have to care a little bit; otherwise you would just ignore them and forget they even live. Or lived.

It's like this," he'd explained once to Connie. "If someone gave you a single rose, you'd be happy, right?" "Okay," he went on, "Now imagine someone gives you ten thousand roses." "That is a whole lotta roses," she said. "That's too much." "Right. Too much. But more than that, it makes each individual rose much less special, right? It makes it hard to pick one out and say, 'That's the good one.' And it makes you want to just get rid of them all because none of them seem special now." Connie had narrowed her eyes. "Are you saying when you're at school you just want to get rid of everyone?

Maybe Rachel was right all along. Maybe the past is past, history is history, and you just push it aside and look for the future.

...called nine-one-one," Howie was saying, "and then I heard something in the alleyway, so I went back there and" --Howie coughed-- "and valiantly attacked his knife with my guts, to no avail." "Did you get a good look at him? Could you describe him?" Howie smiled wanly. "Yeah. He was about yay long" --he held up his hands, four inches apart-- "thin, made of steel. Pointy. Sharp.

Cars are little privacy cocoons that we take with us. If you could refuel while driving you could, theoretically, stay moving forever.