Carson Cistulli

"I read a book not to find its meaning, but to find my happiness."

"Day 468—said the word ‘finger’ until it no longer made sense. Now, looking at my fingers I have no idea what they are, / except they’re wildly useful / for writing letters to my earliest ancestors"

"I've never met a very memorable cobbler."

"Many people say, “Who's my doppelganger?” when maybe / they should ask, “Whose doppelganger am I?”"

"Those activities at which you excel with no effort at all—those are the ones you ought to pursue to the detriment of others."

"Enthusiasm is achieved chiefly by means of provocations. In these cases, something inside of us resonates vibrantly with something outside. / The form of the provocation—be it book, music, sporting event, conversation—matters insofar as it might help to us find these sources of resonance."

"She put snow on the mountain's / peak for me and took the Gallup Poll of my imagination. / She is both the V-Hold and popular fiction of my life. I write / her letters daily, which I'm then prompted to discard. She / engineered several corporate mergers until I couldn't resist / temptation."

"Woody Allen says at the end of Annie Hall that we’re always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it’s so difficult in real life [...] if we can accept Allen’s as a definition of art, then sabermetrics is absolutely an art. And, just as Kalkman notes, it’s an art whose practitioners are bent on seeing justice done — in baseball, if nowhere else."

"If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, it still very probably makes a sound. A baseball game that’s played with no one around to watch it, though — that’s a different proposition."

"Race ain’t nothing but a number."