compare one student's test score to another's. Always measure a child's progress against her past performance. There will always be a better reader, mathematician, or baseball player. Our goal is to help each student become as special as she can be a...
People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that's always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the dri...
Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way he wishes all moments in life could feel: heightened with the sense that anything could happen at any moment--that being alive is important, because ju...
And the reason Luke is thinking about time and free will is because he believes that money is the closest human beings have ever come to crystallizing time and free will into a compact physical form. Cash. Cash is a time crystal. Cash allows you to m...
I pull on her tether all the time but it won’t sink in. I have a feeling I’m using too much magic. I can’t hold so many under my control and pull them in deep. Dean is the only one I have fully immersed. I am the puppet master. I am the only pl...
People said that video games were bad because they made you numb to death, made you register entrails splattering across a screen as a sign of success. In that moment, Val thought that the real problem with games was that the player was suppossed to ...
...leaning over the bright display among the back aisles of a forbidden arcade, rows of other players silent, unnoticed, closing time never announced, playing for nothing but the score itself, the row of numbers, a chance of entering her initials amo...
As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on m...
Most players who play tennis love the game. But I think you also have to respect it. You want to do everything you can in your power to do your best. And for me, I know I get insane guilt if I go home at the end of the day and don't feel I've done ev...
A gifted violin player in danger of becoming a virtuoso and thus too attached to his instrument handed it over to the Oneida authorities and never played again. When a visiting Canadian teacher complained that the community did not foster “genius o...
All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class who worked, ate, slept, and died and a leisured clas...
No man is greater than his prayer life. The pastor who is not praying is playing; the people who are not praying are straying. We have many organizers, but few agonizers; many players and payers, few pray-ers; many singers, few clingers; lots of past...
Sing a song of suspense in which the players die. Four and twenty ravens in an Edgar Allan Pie. When the pie was broken, the ravens couldn't sing. Their throats had been sliced open by Stephen, the new King. The King was in his writing house, stiflin...
Ash: [points to a sign Agnes carries] What's that stand for? Agnes: Huh? It's for, uh, it's for pep... pep. Ash: It's a K. Coach Skip: [runs into frame, grabs a bottle from the cooler; to players] Come on, now! Look alive! [to score-keeper] Coach Ski...
[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, ...
Peter Brand: Billy, this is Chad Bradford. He's a relief pitcher. He is one of the most undervalued players in baseball. His defect is that he throws funny. Nobody in the big leagues cares about him, because he looks funny. This guy could be not just...
Christopher "Chris" Wilton: So tell me, what's a beautiful young American ping-pong player doing mingling among the British upper class? Nola Rice: Did anyone ever tell you you play a very aggressive game? Christopher "Chris" Wilton: Did anyone ever ...
Griffin Mill: So, what's the story? Walter Stuckel: Twenty-five words or less? Okay. Movie exec calls writer. Writer's girlfriend says he's at the movies. Exec goes to the movies, meets writer, drinks with writer. Writer gets conked and dies in four ...
Fortune: You're 5 foot nothin', 100 and nothin', and you have barely a speck of athletic ability. And you hung in there with the best college football players in the land for 2 years. And you're gonna walk outta here with a degree from the University...
Divya Narendra: You invented something in high school too, right? Mark Zuckerberg: An app for an MP3 player that recognizes your taste in music. Divya Narendra: Anybody try to buy it? Mark Zuckerberg: Microsoft. Divya Narendra: Wow. How much? Mark Zu...
Broadway Man on Street: "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." [sees Riggan] Broadway Man on Str...
