I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing--for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

There is nothing "ordinary" about reality.

A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.

I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.