The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have c...
I’m fading, Bethany, I know it. I think that’s what happened to my dad, that’s why I can’t see him. One day I’ll be so see-through that you’ll forget I was ever here, just like everyone else has.
The vigor I lacked for physical activities became incandescent when, pen in hand, I filled those pages with invented stories. Sometimes they were intimately about me – family tales, parental exploits – sometimes they became horrific stories sprin...
If only I could handle my problems like a video-game style battle against a boss. But there are no power-ups in real life. No FTW moment when I can declare total pwnage. I don’t even know who the bad guys are.
Curiously, only in sports do we agree to eschew technological advances, making rules, for example, to limit the power potential of baseball bats. We understand that technology will ruin our games, but we do not understand that it can also ruin cultur...
You never know what you're going to get with a pinball game," John said. "It's a lot like life. You can't control it, so you have to just roll with it and do the best you can. And if you do well enough, sometimes you get a bonus play.
It scares me how hard it is to remember life before you. I can't even make the comparisons anymore, because my memories of that time have all the depth of a photograph. It seems foolish to play games of better and worse. It's simply a matter of is an...
The sacred stillness of your brilliant heart has as the myriad wonders masqueraded. But if you knew this secret from the start, then you'd have quit this Game before you played it.
Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation.
Gabe scratched his double chin. "Maybe if you hurry with the seven-layer dip...And maybe if the kid apologizes for interrupting my poker game." Maybe if I kick you in your soft spot, I thought. And make you sing Soprano for a week.
...I've spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as "the sport of the future" since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tyson pounding the Earthborn into the ground like a game of whack-a-mole. Ella was fluttering above him, dodging missiles and calling out advice: "The groin. The Earthborn's groin is sensitive." SMASH! "Good. Yes....
Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder. It is about restoration of the right relations among things and going home is where that restoration occurs because that is where it matters most.
I found my mind wandering at games; loved boxing and was good at it; and in summer, having chosen rowing instead of cricket, lay peacefully by the Stour, well upstream of the rhythmic creaking and the exhortation, reading and Gibbon and gossiping wit...
He was right, and the pursuit of justice was also a game, where one man or woman employed by the Government, or sometimes twelve men and women, decided the fate of another. Whether or not that decision was just depended on your point of view. The win...
I mean, five gods in one stomach—dang. That's enough for doubles tennis, including a ref. They'd been down there so long, they were probably hoping Kronos would swallow down a deck of cards or a Monopoly game.
Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age,...
Because once you give your body to a guy, there's no taking it back. And once you've done that it opens up feelings, emotions and vulnerabilities you never knew you were capable of having. I'm not ready to give him my heart. What if he breaks it?
MacMillian steepled his fingers on the head of his cane. Anticipation rose in his chest. Lena and Cyrus Alan might have an advantage over him when it came to hunting ghosts, but this was where he excelled. This part of the game was all about patterns...
Kestrel's cruel calculation appalled her. This was part of what had made her resist the military: the fact that she could make decisions like this, that she did have a mind for strategy, that people could be so easily become pieces in a game she was ...
I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment o...
