Whoever listens to slander is himself a slanderer.
Baseball, of all sports, and maybe of all human endeavors, has no room for cynicism.
Faith without a measure of doubt ain't worth a brass farthin.
There was a code, and though it was mostly unspoken, I absorbed it early on. You always put all the trout back in the water alive except for a few to eat. You didn't count your trout or call attention to their size or weight. You took time to watch and enjoy seeing your partners catch trout.
I've admired Bill Kauffman's books for years. . . appealing, elegantly written, and entirely American.
Rick Bass is one of a dwindling handful of American fiction writers still celebrating the importance of place, the natural world, and the struggle of a few brave souls to live and work respectfully in what's left of our western wilderness. . . The Lives of Rocks is his most lyrical and powerful book to date. . . a masterwork.
Once you understand what excellence is all about. . . you see how that excellence manifests itself in any discipline.
We may yet work up to some serious shooting war, or maybe some acts of urban genocide committed with rogue nuclear weapons. But if that were the case, why would we call that "911"? If Washington disappeared in a mushroom cloud, we'd give that huge event a different name.
Missing your lunch is not exactly the end of the world.
I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash-and it may be well that we become so hardened.