"Much of the commentary on modern marriage is frankly terrifying. Miller describes “the marital ghetto” — the marital ghetto? — as “the human equivalent of a balanced aquarium, where the fish and the plants manage to live indefinitely off each other’s waste products.” Perhaps we’d been striving in raising children and not in marriage because child-rearing is a dictatorship and marriage is a democracy. The children do not get to vote on the direction of the relationship, on which sleep-training or discipline philosophy they like best. But with a spouse, particularly a contemporary American spouse, equality is foundational, assumed. A friend had recently told me that he thought I was the boss in my marriage. Did I really want to negotiate my marriage anew and risk losing that power? From the bathroom, Dan asked, “Do you really think this project is a good idea?”

I realized that my favorite books about marriage — Calvin Trillin’s “About Alice” and Joan Didion’s “Year of Magical Thinking” — included one spouse who was dead."
- Elizabeth Weil, "Married (Happily) With Issues." NYT Magazine.

"In crunch time situations the Rockets' coaching staff now leaves it up to Battier and Artest to figure out the matchups. In this case Artest feels it is time. 'Once a guy starts heating up, I make the switch,' he tells me after the game, adding definitively, 'At the end of the game, I go on the best guy.' Then, since he is Ron Artest, he contradicts himself by adding, 'I always go ask permission from Shane first.'"
- Chris Ballard, The Art of a Beautiful Game

"The next two hours are, to Billy Beane, a revelation. When the dust settles on the first seven rounds, the A's have acquired five more of the hitters from Billy's and Paul's wish list - Teahen, Baker, Kiger, Stavisky, and Colamarino. When in the seventh round Erik leans in and takes the last of these, an ambidextrous first baseman from the University of Pittsburgh named Brant Colamarino, Paul wears an expression of pure bliss. 'No one else in baseball will agree,' he says, 'but Colamarino might be the best hitter in the country.' That told you how contrary the A's measuring devices were: they were able to draft possibly the best hitter in the country with the 218th pick of the draft. Then Paul says, 'You know what gets me excited about a guy? I get excited about a guy when he has something about him that causes everyone else to overlook him and I know that it is something that just doesn't matter.' When Brant Colamarino removes his shirt for the first time in an A's minor league locker room he inspires his coaches to inform Billy that 'Colamarino has titties.' Colamarino, like Jeremy Brown, does not look the way a young baseball player is meant to look. Titties are one of those things that just don't matter in a ballplayer. Billy's only question for the coaches was whether a male brassiere should be called a 'manzier' or a 'bro.'"
- Michael Lewis, Moneyball

"On his second day at Valley Ranch, Haley wrapped an Ace bandage around his penis and strolled through the locker room naked, screaming, 'I'm the last naked warrior! I'm the last naked warrior!'"
- Jeff Pearlman, Boys Will Be Boys

"Speaking in his thick South Florida accent, getting worked up to a full-throated rant, Andre is off on a verbal tear, invoking Jerome, the pain and hardship he had suffered recovering from his broken ankle, fealty to Buddy, what that Emmitt Smith said, how they all knew they could beat New Orleans and Dallas, for that matter, and, besides, nobody deserved to get injured, and even though he was a Christian and didn't hold a grudge against anybody, far from it, and how piss-poor the New Orleans offense was and how good they could play if they just all got on the same page and how... how... they owed it to him, dammit, if they didn't owe it to themselves... all they had been through together... and the greater glory of Jesus... and... can you believe that that Emmitt Smith would say those things?

In general, it's a first-rate, righteous oration, even if it wanders a bit. Some of the guys have a hard time following Andre's eccentric Everglades inflections.

'What's he saying?' a rookie leans over and asks Golic.

'Wants us to win,' Golic whispers back."
- Mark Bowden, Bringing the Heat

"They had enjoyed such moments together, moments sweetened by promise. There were games in which they just caught fire, when offense, defense, and special teams were all clicking at once, when they were capable of crushing anyone. It was when they achieved this synchronicity, with the crowd roaring and every one of them motoring on love, adrenaline, and conviction, when they were riding a mounting spiral of their own momentum, when they were bringing the heat, that the Game became something timeless, pure, and beautiful, something linked to the earliest amateur contests on college greens, something that connected each player with the thrill he felt when he first played as a child, before he knew about playing with pressure and pain."
- Mark Bowden, Bringing the Heat

"With uncommon insight I divined that a picture about Russian Roulette in Vietnam might not go down too well at Disney."
- Michael Deeley, Blade Runners, Deer Hunters, and Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: My Life in Cult Movies

"One of the most dangerous stunts to film was the leap the Minis make between the roofs of two Fiat factory buildings. It was Remy Julienne who insisted that the stunt was feasible, but I wasn't taking any chances. I wanted to see a test done first on the ground. Julienne and his boys practised many times on the flat. We watched keenly, and I was persuaded that they could do the job - but it is a different matter when those engines are revving at eighty feet above ground. Not only was I concerned for the safety of the drivers, I also had my own fate to worry about. I was told that, as the person in charge of the enterprise, I would be the one held liable if there was an accident. I would immediately be nabbed and thrown into a Turin jail if something went wrong. Thus we arranged that there would be a getaway car by the side door of the factory where we were shooting, and a plane fuelled and ready at the airport. If the worst happened, I could argue my case from outside the country rather than from inside an Italian prison cell.

When it came to get the scene before cameras, the emotion on set was so intense that one of the extra Italian cameramen broke down in tears, unable to witness the action. The crew really didn't want to watch the stunt."
- Michael Deeley, on producing The Italian Job, from Blade Runners, Deer Hunters, & Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: My Life in Cult Movies

"It was a lot of stew we were planning on pouring into this thing, and Dimitri was convinced it would crumble at the table mid-meal, boiling hot fish and lavalike veloute rushing onto the laps of the terrified guests. There would be terrible burns involved, he guessed, 'genital scarring... lawsuits... total disgrace.' Dimitri cheered himself up by suggesting that should the unthinkable happen, we were obliged, like Japanese naval officers, to take our own lives. 'Or like Vatel,' he submitted. 'He ran himself on his sword over a late fish delivery. It's the least we could do.' In the end we agreed that should our Coliseum of Seafood Blanquette fall, we'd simply walk quietly out the door and into the bay to drown ourselves."
- Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

"For Mario's garden party, we spent days together in a walk-in refrigerator, heads filled with accelerants, gluing near-microscopic bits of carved and blanched vegetables onto the sides of roasts and poached fishes and fowls with hot aspic. We must have looked like crazed neurologists, using tweezers, bamboo skewers, and bar straws to cut and affix garnishes, laboring straight through the night. Covered with gelee, sleepless after forty-eight hours in the cooler, we lost all perspective, Dimitri at one point obsessing over a tiny red faux mushroom in one corner of a poached salmon, muttering to himself about the distinctive white dots on the hood of the Amanitra muscara or psilocybin mushroom while he applied dust-sized motes of cooked egg white for 'authenticity.'"
- Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

"My idols of that time had been, all too predictably, Hunter Thompson, William Burroughs, Iggy Pop, and Bruce Lee; I had had, for some time, a romantic if inaccurate view of myself as some kind of hyperviolent, junkie Byron. My last semester at Vassar, I'd taken to wearing nunchakus in a strap-on holster and carrying around a samurai sword - that should tell you all you need to know."
- Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

"He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."
- Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

"'Robbe', what do you call a man who has a pistol and no college degree?'
'A shit with a pistol.'
'Good. What do you call a man with a college degree but no pistol?'
'A shit with a degree.'
'Good. What do you call a man with a degree and a pistol?'
'A man, papa!'
'Bravo, Robertino!'"
- Roberto Saviano, Gomorrah

"My fourth-grade teacher told our class that we should never hitchhike, because the only people who picked up hitchhikers were perverted serial killers. This advice was complicated by what my fifth-grade teacher told us the following year; she said that we would all have driver's licenses in a few years, and the one rule we always needed to remember was never to pick up hitchhikers. This was because all hitchhikers were serial killers. According to what I learned in public school, every person on every freeway was trolling for destruction. I used to imagine nomadic, sadistic drifters thumbing rides with bloodthirsty Volkswagen owners, both desperately waiting for the first opportunity to kill each other. Hitchhiking seemed like an ultraviolent race against time."
- Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

"This being the case, it's clear that Luke Skywalker was the original Gen Xer. For one thing, he was incessantly whiny. For another, he was exhaustively educated - via Yoda - about things that had little practical value (i.e., how to stand on one's head while lifting a rock telekinetically). Essentially, Luke went to the University of Dagobah with a major in Buddhist philosophy and a minor in physical education. There's not a lot of career opportunities for that kind of schooling; that's probably why he dropped out in the middle of the semester."
- Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

"The fact of the matter is that everyone who truly cares about basketball subconsciously knows that Celtics vs. Lakers reflects every fabric of male existence, just as everyone who loves rock'n'roll knows that the difference between the Beatles and the Stones is not so much a dispute over music as it is a way to describe your own self-identity. This is why men need to become obsessed with things: It's an extroverted way to pursue solipsism. We are able to study something that defines who we are; therefore, we are able to study ourselves."
- Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

"It appears that countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack. I cannot fathom how he isn't the number-one box-office star in America, because every straight girl I know would sell her soul to share a milkshake with that motherfucker."
- Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

"Eventually, the bus appeared on the distant horizon, and one of the women, with the relief and disbelief that often accompanies the arrival of public transport said, 'Oh look, the bus is coming.' The other woman - a wise woman, seemingly aware that her words and attitude were potent and poetic enough to form the final sentence in a stranger's book - paused, then said, 'The bus was always coming.'

The End"
- Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

"Bill Clinton came into office wanting to do everything, but he chose to do everything one thing at a time. His opponents realized that if they could jam him on the early stuff - health care, certainly, but before that, gays in the military - they could gum up his whole agenda until he began to trip over his own dick, figuratively and otherwise."
- Charles P. Pierce, "Barack Obama, Madman." Esquire, July 2009

“We’ll go up there, he’ll give us his partner, we’ll pick up his partner, his partner will say D-Block’s a lying motherfucker, will say ‘Look at me, I’m two twenty-five and ripped. I never had to use a gun in my life.’ But he’ll also tell us something, like the only guy he knows uses a .38, does inside-the-building holdups, is some character, let’s call him E-Walk. OK. Let’s go find E-Walk. Problem is, E-Walk is a solo operator, but E-Walk, it’ll turn out, will know this other stickup team we never even heard of. Go track down those boneheads. Only problem with those guys once we find them is that one was locked up at the time of the homicide and the other was in the hospital. But! The one in the hospital? He’ll know a guy that uses a .38, sometimes works with a partner, except that guy, it’ll turn out, is a light-skinned Dominican, looks almost white. But. But. But. The point of which is to say, Billy, that with your son, it’ll have to do with luck, and it’ll have to do with just plugging away, plugging away....”
- Richard Price, Lush Life

"An hour later, in Lambeth, I saw a hang-dog man, obviously a tramp, coming towards me, and when I looked again it was myself, reflected in a shop window. The dirt was plastering my face already. Dirt is the great respecter of persons; it lets you alone when you are well dressed, but as soon as your collar is gone it flies towards you from all directions."
- Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

"Of all the consumer products, chewing gum is perhaps the most ridiculous: it literally has no nourishment - you just chew it to give yourself something to do with your stupid idiot Western mouth.

Half the world is starving, and the other's going, 'I don't actually need any nutrition, but it would be good to masticate, just to keep my mind off things.'"
- Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

"You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs."
- Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

"It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty - it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring."
- Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London