Bryan Joiner

For us, the mountain was a challenge. For them, the mountain was a daily, unmysterious fact of life, pictured on their beer bottles and laundry detergent boxes.

– From Tom Bisell’s essay, “Up the Mountain Slowly, Very Slowly,” in The New York Times’ Play Magazine, a story about his ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro.

There were a lot of white people here. I had come to designate the places where the white outnumbered the black as North Face Africa, a place seen only in the Kilimanjaro International Airport, the better hotels and restaurants, and any other mountain-related holding station.

– Bissell

[H]is agent, Bill Duffy, had told me: “With Steve it’s all about the flow.” Flow, of course, being shorthand for that state of mind that artists and athletes strive to enter into, and which in full flood entails an ecstatic expansion of consciousness that releases them from confines of the self and produces crowning moments of creation and performance — not to get too mystical about it.

– Chip Brown, also in Play magazine, in his feature article on Steve Nash’s trip to China

Baseball will stick it to you; it means to break your heart… old fans do understand that it’s losing, in all its variety, that makes winning so sweet…

– Roger Angell, inadvertently echoing my thoughts on the 2007 Red Sox in his farewell piece to Joe Torre in The New Yorker

When calm at last arrived—when the brutal Savimbi was killed by government forces in 2002—people in the cities began cautiously to repaint their houses. A person who does not believe in tomorrow does not repaint his house.

– Henning Mankell, in the “Angola” chapter of a book I recently picked up, The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup

Listen, we’re not just a good team. We’re a great team. And don’t you fucking forget that. And let’s go play one game at a time and go prove that. Because let me tell you something… There’s a reason why you wear this Red Sox uniform… Because you’re a bad motherfucker.

– David Ortiz, as quoted in Sports Illustrated, to the Red Sox after game 3 of the ALCS

If any of you guys actually read these articles, could you let me know?