He was over all the time, all the time! He would stand outside and playfully throw rocks at the house. Roberto would always tease me. He liked to tell me that I couldn't cook. I couldn't cook. He and Curtis would sit there and eat half-cooked food, playing cards and drinking beer, pop, lemonade, whatever. Roberto loved to joke, he was really just a big kid. [...] Roberto and Curt were very close. Roberto would stay at the house all day long until it was time to go to the ballpark. Roberto and Curt would sit around and talk and joke in Spanish. Robert [sic] would look at me with that boyish smile ... he liked to make me think they were joking about me, or talking about some other girl. But he would always break down laughing, and tell me what he and Curtis had been saying. Roberto naturally gravitated to someone who could understand him. Even though we were all kids back then, I think Roberto looked at Curtis as something of a mentor.
Roberto ClementeRelated topics
beer break close cook day drinking eat food girl house joke kid laughing mentor outside playing saying sit smile something stand stay talking talk tell throw whatever someone cards ballpark Curtis rocksRelated quotes
The greater part of the time I spent, when I talked at all, talking to men. I liked to take luncheon in some pub or other, sitting on a high stool at the snack-counter, barons of beef, hams, salads and dishes of pickle spread before me, the server in his tall white cap carving with skill. Other male eaters would be wedged against me, champing over newspapers, and there were a peculiar animal content in being among warm silent men, raising glasses in smacking silent toasts to themselves, the automatic ‘ah' after the draught, the forkful of red beef and mustard pickle. Sitting with my gin or whisky afterwards I would often manage to get into conversation with some lonely man or other – usually an exile like myself – and the talk would be about the world, air-routes and shipping-lines, drinking-places thousands of miles away. Then I felt happy, felt I had come home, because home to people like me is not a place but all places, all places except the one we happen to be in at the moment.
Anthony Burgess
I'd have played against him (Len Bias) for the next 14 years. I would have been in my prime and he would have been in his. I'll never forget what he looked like. He was a 'Wow!' player. When Maryland played and was on television, I watched. It was like, 'I need to watch this guy; I'll be seeing him real soon.'... It was just shocking. Thing is, cocaine was huge then. My brother had been in and out of rehab a few times.... It was a popular drug at the time. And guys I was playing against, like John Lucas and Michael Ray Richardson and John Drew had done cocaine. I was thinking: 'What the hell is up with this cocaine? I should try this once to see what it was all about.' Then, we heard the reports were that Bias only used it once... that it was his first time. When I heard that, it scared me to death... scared the daylights out of me. It scared me into not trying it even once, not going anywhere near it.
Charles Barkley
We must be prepared to accept the will of God. The Lord permits all sorts of things to happen to us contrary to our will, for if we always have it our way, we will not be prepared for the Kingdom of Heaven. Neither heaven nor earth will receive those who are self-willed.
God has a Divine plan for each one of us, and we must submit to His plan. We must accept life as it is given to us, without asking, "Why me?” We must know that nothing on earth or in heaven ever happens without the will of God or His permission. We must not become too engrossed with our hardships but concentrate on preserving our inner peace.
Even when we are praying for something, we are trying to force our will instead of accepting God's. All hardships and sorrows that God sends us are necessary for us, but we do not understand this when we are young. When we are older, then we understand that this is the way God shows His love for us.
Tadej of Vitovnica
What he had been talking about all the time as Quality was here the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge, everything.
Then his mind's eye looked up and caught his own image and realized where he was and what he was seeing and...I don't know what really happened...but the slippage that Phædrus had felt earlier, the internal parting of his mind, suddenly gathered momentum, as do the rocks at the top of a mountain. Before he could stop it, the sudden accumulated mass of awareness began to grow and grow into an avalanche of thought and awareness out of control; with each additional growth of the downward tearing mass loosening hundreds of times its volume, and then that mass uprooting hundreds of times its volume more, and then hundreds of times that; on and on, wider and broader, until there was nothing left to stand.
No more anything.
It all gave way from under him.
Robert M. Pirsig
I never learned the names of the streets because I couldn't wait to get out. It was too small and I was bored. I was a pretentious little twerp and I had ideas above my station, which everyone should have. I was deeply ambitious but I was deeply dismissive of what was there and that was a mistake. Wexford was a fascinating town and so was the society. I remember a friend of mine telling me about wife-swapping parties that went on there and how people would throw their keys into the middle of a bowl. This was the late 1950s. I didn't believe a word of it. If I believed him and looked about, I would have found another version of Wexford. I'm not saying that I wanted to be at wife-swapping parties, but the Wexford I imagined wasn't necessarily the Wexford that was real. So I blinded myself and I was just as narrow-minded and blinkered as the people whom I despised there. That was a mistake.
John Banville