A Jewish Man With His Parents Alive

To Read A Novel Requires A Certain Kind Of Concentration, Focus, Devotion To The Reading. If You Read A Novel In More Than Two Weeks, You Don't Read The Novel Really.

For Someone Whose Roots In America Were Strong But Only Inches Deep, And Who Had No Experience, Such As A Catholic Child Might, Of An Awesome Hierarchy That Was Real And Felt, Baseball Was A Kind Of Secular Church That Reached Into Every Class And Region Of The Nation And Bound Millions Upon Millions Of Us Together In Common Concerns, Loyalties, Rituals, Enthusiasms, And Antagonisms. Baseball Made Me Understand What Patriotism Was About, At Its Best.

You Cannot Observe People Through An Ideology. Your Ideology Observes For You.

You Go To Someone And You Think, 'i'll Tell Him This.' But Why? The Impulse Is That The Telling Is Going To Relieve You. And That's Why You Feel Awful Later--you've Relieved Yourself, And If It Truly Is Tragic And Awful, It's Not Better, It's Worse---the Exhibitionism Inherent To A Confession Has Only Made The Misery Worse.

There Is Truth And Then Again There Is Truth. For All That The World Is Full Of People Who Go Around Believing They've Got You Or Your Neighbor Figured Out, There Really Is No Bottom To What Is Not Known. The Truth About Us Is Endless. As Are The Lies.