But words mattered, more so in Newark than many other places. In a world where income and possessions were limited, words represented dignity, pride, self-worth.
A poetry professor had once defined romance to me as "bringing two people together when every force in the universe is working to keep them apart.
Agatha loved military men. Actually, she loved men in uniform. And my bowling league outfit used to drive her wild with desire.
On the Russian revolutionaries: To leave your parents, faithful and loyal subjects of the Emperor, to leave your profession, to desist from having children, to lose your fortune, and to give up your civil honor, all for revolutionary conviction, make...
I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves an...
In East Orange, initiations were completed by murdering someone, for no other reason than to prove to a tremendously cold, tremendously tight brotherhood that you possessed the hardness required to watch their backs.
Trust is something you have to practice. Someday you're going to fall in love with someone, and you need to understand what trust is all about. What you doing now is developing bad practices of betraying people's trust.
The key is to put your outrage in a place where you can get it when you need to, but not have it bubble up so much, especially when you're asked to explain new ideas or explain what you observed two people who share none of your experiences.
Younger wizards in particular went about saying that is was time magic started to update its image and that they should all stop mucking about with bits of wax and bone and put the whole thing on a properly-organised basis, with research programmes a...
[first lines] Brian: [narration voice-over] The summer I was 8 years old, five hours disappeared from my life. Five hours. Lost. Gone without a trace. Brian: [narration voice-over] Last thing I remember I was sitting on the bench at my Little League ...
Very few who manage a big league club are successful, fewer still are the ones who experience success over an extended period of time, but to achieve a level of success so extraordinary that it is given a category all it’s own—“The Big Red Mach...
I was so raw I didn't know about the Lambeau Leap-a Packer player celebrates catching a touchdown by leaping into the stands. It was started by Leroy Butler years before and has been copied by players all over the league. Don't be fooled, though. The...
On hands and knees the figure comes pacing along beside the wall that flanks the patio, lithe, sinuous, knife in mouth perpendicular to its course. In moonlight and out of it, as each successive archway of the portico circles high above it, comes dow...
Ted Williams hit 17 career grand slams. He is the toughest batter to get out in major league history. It was never fun for opposing pitchers to have to face him, but that was never more true than it was when there was nowhere to put him—and his gra...
The day was ill-omened from the beginning; one of those unlucky days when every little detail seems to go wrong and one finds oneself engaged in a perpetual and infuriating strife with inanimate objects. How truly fiendish the sub-human world can be ...
I have a secret. A big, fat, hairy secret. And I’m not talking minor-league stuff, like I once let Joseph Applebaum feel me up behind the seventh-grade stairwell or I got a Brazilian wax after work last Friday or I’m hiding a neon blue vibrator c...
At Yale, most everyone (except Oswaldo Gutierrez) refrained from telling Rob what to do, because of the way he'd grown up in Newark. In Newark, most everyone (except Oswaldo Gutierrez) refrained from telling Rob what to do, because of the way he'd go...
Unbeknownst to me, from the beginning of freshman year Rob and Oswaldo had been drawn away from Yale via their friends on the dining hall and custodial staffs, outward into the city of New Haven. Rob considered these excursions a much-needed dose of ...
The word "fronting" was important to Rob. A coward who acted tough was fronting. A nerd who acted dumb was fronting. A rich kid who acted poor was fronting. Rob found the instinct very offensive, and in college he saw it all around.
Italian-Americans in New York had not been in much of a flag-waving mood prior to DiMaggio's arrival. By the All-Star break, the rookie had established himself as a wonderful player (.358, 10HR, 60 RBIs), fully justifying the acclaim. But Gehrig was ...
David Hudson was rising in the political field. As a senator from New York, he had it all – good looks, a well-known family name and the finances to go with it, but for David, it was never enough. He graduated from an Ivy League school at the top o...
