People From New York City

"There is only so much space on the planet. Fathers perish to make room for sons."

"I wonder if anyone always knows-you, me, Jackie Robinson, even Robert Frost-that we will cross to Safety. Or is it rather that when we are There, we think we always knew?"

"The gracious mistress turned bitch in summer heat."

"The immeasurable difference between producing cars and producing newspapers is pursuit of the horizon."

"Defeat, particularly dramatic defeat, confirms our worst impression of ourselves."

"At carefree times in early boyhood I chose to believe that life was a kind of ball game, but with a mix of years and perception I learned better."

"I never heard a thrown ball make that sound before. The ball seemed to accelerate as it came close; an accelerating, impossibly fast pitch that made the noises of hornets and snakes."

"The time seems simpler than today, but mostly because the past always seems simpler when its wars are done."

"Nouns and verbs carry writing."

"What did it matter, Babe Ruth or Jersey Joe Stripp? If vector analysis was beyond me, I could still watch a ball game."

"In the dead sunlight of a forgotten spring the major leaguers were trim, graceful and effortless. They might have been gods for these seemed true Olympians to a boy who wanted to become a manand who sensed that it was an exalted manly thing to catch a ball with one hand thrust across your body and make a crowd leap to its feet and cheer."

"Baseball skill relates inversely to age. The older a man gets, the better a ball player he was when young, according to the watery eye of memory."

"The world is never again as it was before anyone you love has ever died; never so innocent, never so fixed, never so gentle, never so pliant to your will. But these are afterthoughts. Generations vie and the young recover swiftly, or believe they do."

"When the wind blew from the south and the French doors had been opened, the sound of cheering carried from Ebbets Field into the apartment. It was astonishing, to hear cheers from a major league crowd while sitting at home."

"Being and writing, the road asked nothing more."

"Unlike most, a ball player must confront two deaths. First, between the ages of thirty and forty he perishes as an athlete. Although he looks trim and feels vigorous and retains unusual coordination, the superlative reflexes, the major league reflexes, pass on. At a point when many of his classmates are newly confident and rising in other fields, he finds that he can no longer hit a very good fast ball or reach a grounder four strides to his right. At thirty-five he is is experiencing the truth of finality. As his major league career is ending, all things will end. However he sprang, he was always earthbound. Mortality embraces him. The golden age has passed in a moment. So will all things. So will all moments."

"One thing a writer has, if he is fortunate, and I have been fortunate, is a partnership with the years."

"He bore the burden of a pioneer and the weight made him strong. If one can be certain of anything in baseball, it is that we shall not look upon his like again."

"Surely these fine athletes, those boys of summer, have found their measure of ruin."

"In the intimacy of Ebbets Field it was a short trip from the grandstand to the fantasy you were in the game."

"You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it."

"That morning began with wind and hairy clouds. It was late March and the day rose brisk and uncertain, with gusts suggesting January and flashes of sun promising June. In every way, a season of change had come."

"One did not go to Ebbets Field for sociology. Exciting baseball was the attraction, and a wonder of the sociological Brooklyn Dodgers was the excitement of their play."

"At a point of life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams."

"It was a time of transition, which few recognized, and glutting national satisfaction. Students and scholars were silent."

"One can travel for weeks with baseball men and see no books at all."

"No game is as verbal as baseball; baseball spreads twenty minutes of action across three hours of a day."

"And the goddamn subway reeked like a sewer. All those goddamn animals jammed into the train like the ark . . . yeah, thats what they are, a bunch of stinking animals."

"There is nothing worse than a cultural barbarian with pretensions."

"And their love life got better with time. Familiarity bred excitement. They loved discovering those little things, the touch, that made the other respond with a quiver or a sigh, and, in turn, having the discovery made."

"Obviously, I believe that to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul. Why? The reason is simple: because Life/life is giving, not getting."

"He replaced the gray of the walls with a darker shade by closing his eyes. It felt good to shut out some of the light. Not all, but just some. Just enough so there was a gray without images or threatening corners. Not the blackness that gives birth to those sudden flashes of stinging light that slashes your eyes, or the velvety darkness that thickens and become animated and flows and somehow moves around and over you. Just a soothing gray. Nothing to see."

"They dont know the terrors that go through your mind as you lie there in the pit waiting for a hint of light to tell you that the night is over."

"A dark yet shallow sleep. A submission to exhaustion. A loss of consciousness and an avoidance of light, Yet not deep enough to avoid the turbulence on the surface while deep enough to feel the pressure from the bottom. Whatever or whoever he was sought to find the finite area where all pressures are equal and constant. To find that small pocket of weightlessness where no pressure is felt, where there is no tugging in opposite directions, no straining for a painless balance, where all of him was suspended and cushioned between the 2 crushing and yanking pressures where no pressures existed. Where no light existed. Where no time existed. Where no need or desire existed. Where there existed no blackness. There, where there existed nothing, not even a void."

"Yet the harder he fought to find this the more distant it became. The more he struggled against the pressures the more imprisoned he became. The more enmeshed he became in their conflicting directions. the further he was tugged in opposite directions that kept him immobile. And the harder he fought for movement, any movement, the more stationary became his position, the more painful his existence."

"Time has to pass. But sometimes its so goddamn long. Sometimes it just seems to drag and drag and weigh a ton. And hang on you like a monkey. Like its going to suck the blood out of you. Or squeeze your guts out. And sometimes it flies. And is gone somewhere, somehow, before you know it was even here. As if time is only here to make you miserable. That's the only reason for time. To squeeze you. Crush you. To tie you up in knots and make you fucking miserable."

"He fought despairingly to go deeper into the blackness of a sleep, any sleep, even the sleep of death or some form of non-existence, but even with the loss of consciousness he dreamt he was awake, lying on the bed trying desperately to sleep. If he could find some way to prove that time had passed, no matter how short that time, he could tell himself that he had slept and perhaps then, just perhaps, he would feel rested."

"They had all they needed. They had the madness of pain."

"I guess I had fun. But not enough to stay."

"Time seemed stationary, yet the painful pressure of time was constantly felt. If only the pressure would crush the life out of him and allow him simply to sink into the inviting movement of clock hands or feel the passing of time he could then feel he was getting closer to something or at least further away from something, it didnt really matter which. Nothing really mattered. If only there were some kind of movement. But everything remained motionless, the body not even moving on the bed, while feeling the tearing pressures from all sides in all directions. Feeling deep within him in that pit where there lived the violent and contorting pain of maggots crawling through your guts between the rusty cans and broken bottles and the screaming urgency to get time to move, to just move before every FUCKING GODDAMN PART OF YOUR BODY SCREWS UP INTO A FUCKING BALL AND YOUR WHOLE FUCKING BODY DISINTEGRATES, JUST SHATTERS and there was no escape, even with the lack consciousness, for with it came dreams of wakefulness. There was no escape from the past. The struggle against it only entangled him deeper in the fear of the future. There was no place for him to go. No place he could hide. No place where his enemy didnt exist. No escape from unconscious wakefulness. There was no rest."

"There was a sense of security in old, familiar feelings in spite of their discomfort."

"A cigarette only takes a certain amount of time to smoke and though this takes time it seems to take less and less with each one and you can only smoke so many, there comes a time when you have to stop, when you just cant light the next one . . . at least not for a while."

"Its quite an experience to be locked up all by yourself in any size room, no less a little cell."

"Sometimes we have the absolute certainty there's something inside us that's so hideous and monstrous that if we ever search it out we won't be able to stand looking at it. But it's when we're willing to come face to face with that demon that we face the angel."

"He flowed deeper and deeper into himself, wrapped in the comforting strength of hate."

"A little sleep and then a little wakefulness. Then a slipping to some soothing place in between."

"Theres always somebody bugging you. They just wont leave you alone. No matter how simple things are there always some sonofabitch complicating things and fucking with your life. Jesus, this fucking world stinks. People are nothing but a bunch of shits. A rotten bunch of shits. They always want to screw you."

"Yes, I have five dollars for each of you."

"Everybody sat around thinking about Panasonic, the Japanese electronics account. Finally I decided, what the hell, I'll throw a line to loosen them up. "The headline is, the headline is: From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor.""

"I had a special project to do a campaign for a Philadelphia politician named Arlen Spector (sic). “When do I get to see Arlen Spector?” I asked. “You don’t.” Spector was a district attorney in Philadelphia, running for mayor. He wanted New York advertising but he had placed through a Philadelphia agency. I complained about not being able to see Arlen Spector. “Are you crazy?” his people said. “Nobody gets to meet Arlen Spector. We can’t even see him.” “All right,” I said, “what’s Arlen Spector for?” “Arlen Spector is for getting elected.” “All right,” I said, “what’s Arlen Spector against?” “Arlen Spector is against losing.” I did the campaign, but Arlen Spector lost."