If You Can Stand It, Play the Long Game . . . What I mean here is that you have to remain committed to the ultimate goal, which isn’t to win the immediate approval of the online world, or dazzle a workshop, but to improve your storytelling day by d...
Currents of cigarette fumes wafted through what passed for air. Attractive young women in bright-hued gowns glided through the streams of smoke, like tropical fish in an aquarium. Detecting the white uniforms and leathery faces, they promptly approac...
Who but the sports-mad [Norman] Mailer would liken the battle between God and the Devil to a game of American football? The contest, for sure, has with [ ] own laws (so that after God and the Devil 'tackle a guy, they don't kick him in the head'), bu...
Now obviously all this--taking upon oneself to hate those whom one things God's enemies, avoiding the society of those one thinks wicked, judging our neighbors, thinking oneself "too good" for some of them (not in the snobbish way, which is a trivial...
The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the...
He realized that he agonized over everything all the time, and he admitted that part of the problem in the Carter game had been his own lack of belief in his abilities. He knew the reason why he was like this, that it was the price he paid for carefu...
Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another e...
Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew ...
/.../he was asked to march to the front hall and retrieve his backpack. He did so with the energy of a convicted killer on his way to the execution chamber. Harold's backpack was an encyclopedia of boyhood interests and suggested that Harold was well...
How destiny plays games so thrilling, both stay in the same building. His books declared for the best seller of the year, and she lives in the apartment to his but upstairs. He is making fame, she has committed suicide severe. The same window of the ...
Jim Garrison: I never realized Kennedy was so dangerous to the establishment. Is that why? X: Well that's the real question, isn't it? Why? The how and the who is just scenery for the public. Oswald, Ruby, Cuba, the Mafia. Keeps 'em guessing like som...
Agnes: If this is the best you can do, don't bother. Go home, and keep your perfume. We just pretend to be friends because there's no one else to be with. You know what the most boring thing I've ever done is? When you took me to that wheelchair bask...
Narrator: Home was a condo on the fifteenth floor of a filing cabinet for widows and young professionals. The walls were solid concrete. A foot of concrete is important when your next-door neighbor lets their hearing aid go and have to watch game-sho...
[Mark goes out to the field, where Ray and Karin are watching the players] Mark: So, I thought you were going to watch some game? Ray Kinsella: Well, it's more of a practice since there's only eight of them. Mark: Eight of what? Ray Kinsella: [motion...
Dory: How about we play a game? Marlin: All right. Dory: Okay, I'm thinking of something orange, and it's small... Marlin: It's me. Dory: Right! [Later] Dory: I'm thinking of something orange and small... Marlin: Me again. Dory: All right, Mr. Smarty...
Lucius Verus: I like you Spaniard, and I shall cheer for you. Maximus: They let you watch the games? Lucius Verus: My uncle says it makes me strong. Maximus: And what does your father say? Lucius Verus: My father's dead. Servant: Master Lucius, it is...
Nicholas: [In the stopped elevator] I'll give you a boost. Christine: You first. Nicholas: This isn't an attempt to be gallant. If I don't lift you, how are you going to get there? Christine: You pull me up. Nicholas: It's much easier this way. Come ...
Roberta: [looking at a drawing of a man smashing another man's head in with a sledgehammer] What can you tell us about your piece, er... Phillip? Phillip: Er... it's about The Mutilator. Roberta: [smiling] My goodness! Phillip: It's a really great vi...
[in their $3,000 game, after Minnesota Fats breaks, it's Eddie's shot] Fast Eddie: How should I play that one, Bert? Play it safe? That's the way you always told me to play it: safe... play the percentage. Well, here we go: fast and loose. One ball, ...
Big John: You Eddie Felson. Fast Eddie: Who's he? Big John: What's your game? Whaddaya shoot? Fast Eddie: You name it, we shoot it. Big John: Look, friend, I'm not trying to hustle. I don't never hustle people that walk in a poolroom with leather sat...
[Smaug has been keeping the Arkenstone away from Bilbo throughout their talk, however he lets it fall within reach of Bilbo] Smaug: I am almost tempted to let you take it, if only to see Oakenshield suffer, watch it destroy him, watch it corrupt his ...
