Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.

I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables.

I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.

...the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.

What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.