You're not listening with your eyes.

He cried that night for all that he had lost, but he would say it taught him a valuable lesson: that holding on to things "will only break your heart.

I think, in general, the sports I've enjoyed covering the most have been the offbeat ones. The more popular, mainstream, the less I like them because they're more, they're more structured and the players don't have much interesting to say because they're interviewed all the time.

Soon man will count all his days, and then smaller segments of the day, and then smaller still—until the counting consumes him, and the wonder of the world he has been given is lost.

This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for.

Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father.

By now, the morning sun was just over the horizon and it came at me like a sidearm pitch between the houses of my old neighborhood. I shielded my eyes. This being early October, there were already piles of leaves pushed against the curb—more leaves than I remembered from my autumns here—andless open space in the sky. I think what you notice most when you haven’t been home in a while is how much the trees have grown around your memories.