"Occupation is not a science but a deep art that can only be learned through experience."
- Rory Stewart, The Prince of the Marshes

"Our [gym] instructor was Detective Washington, who had taught there for most of his career. He was a superb athlete and a black belt, and he sought to hone our survival skills by providing all kinds of so-far-unimagined motivations:

'You know what's gonna happen if you get killed on the Job -- if you're too fat to run up to the thirtieth floor of the Polo Grounds projects on a gun run, and you're gasping for breath on the fifth, too wiped out to do anything but throw up, you can't even lift your arms, forget about remembering this wrist hammer-lock we learned today -- and Bam! You are done! And everybody's gonna be sad for a while, and the Mayor and the PC will go to your funeral, and a few months, a year later, your partner, your best friend, the one who said he'd look out for you, he's gonna be looking out for your wife! He calls to see how she's feeling, and he's the only one who understands, and the next thing you know, they're on the beach together in Martinique! Martinique! My favorite place in the world, and they're gonna be drinking mai-tais and daiquiris and saying, 'Should we have another?' and 'Yeah, why not!' because you're paying for it! They're living fat on your pension money there, and speaking of fat, you're gonna look down and say, 'Shit, she's looking good, why couldn't she lose those fifteen pounds for me! She does it for him, and not for me!' So do yourself a favor and stay in shape, and remember what I'm teaching you today so your partner can buy his own mai tais for his own fat wife....'"
- Edward Conlon, Blue Blood

"Child Welfare called me because one of their workers had been harassed by a man named Larry during the investigation of a case of child neglect, and I was quick to interrupt, 'That would be Crazy Larry.' He sometimes dated an enormous drunk woman who had loose custody of her niece's children, and when they were on the outs, he would leave threatening notes under her door. He had somehow obtained stationery from Bronx Lebanon Hospital, but the woman was able to discern that the crude scrawls of 'You got the AIDS, Bitch! Fuck you, You got the Clapp!' were not the diagnosis of a qualified physician. In fact, I was there for the removal of the children, early one Sunday afternoon, when the woman's brother tried to wake her, pinching her nose and covering her mouth till she came to, pitching and bucking like a Brahma bull -- she'd risen and fallen early that day, on fortified wine -- and the caseworker walked past the three smiling children in playpens to examine the refrigerator and its solitary container of sour milk, when there was a furious pounding on the door. I inquired, 'Who is it?'
The reply came: 'This is the police! Who are you?'
I said, 'This is the police! Who are you? Crazy Larry?'
'No, I'm the police, you're Crazy Larry!'
'No, you're Crazy Larry, I'm the police!'
'Police!'
'Crazy Larry!'
'Police!'
'Larry!'
In the end, I think I won the point, because he left first. Moreover, although we both get checks from the City, I still wear a blue uniform while he yells at fire hydrants on 169th Street and Washington Avenue."
- Edward Conlon, Blue Blood

"I can say with a great degree of certainty that I was one of the only straight white boys in the greater Philadelphia area who wanted more than anything else to be a member of New Edition. If there were others, I would like to meet them. Perhaps we can start some sort of club or something. That might be nice."
- Jason Mulgrew, Everything Is Wrong With Me

"To me, it was obvious man created God in his own image. Man hasn’t the imagination to come up with a God totally unlike him, which is why in Renaissance paintings God looks like a skinny version of Santa Claus."
- Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

"I saw all the dawns come up too early and all the middays reminding you you'd better get a hurry on and all the dusks whisper 'I don't think you're going to make it' and all the shrugging midnights say 'Better luck tomorrow.' I saw all the hands that ever waved to a stranger thinking it was a friend. I saw all the eyes that ever winked to let someone know their insult was only a joke. I saw all the men wipe down toilet seats before urinating but never after. I saw all the lonely men stare at department store mannequins and think 'I'm attracted to a mannequin. This is getting sad.' I saw all the love triangles and a few love rectangles and one crazy love hexagon in the back room of a sweaty Parisian cafe. I saw all the condoms put on the wrong way. I saw all the ambulance drivers on their off hours caught in traffic wishing there was a dying man in the backseat. I saw all the charity-givers wink at heaven. I saw all the Buddhists bitten by spiders they wouldn't kill. I saw all the flies bang uselessly into the screen doors and all the fleas laughing as they rode in on pets. I saw all the broken dishes in all the Greek restaurants and all the Greeks thinking 'Culture's one thing, but this is getting expensive.' I saw all the lonely people scared by their own cats. I saw all the prams, and anyone who says all babies are cute didn't see the babies I saw. I saw all the funerals and all the acquaintances of the dead enjoying their afternoon off work. I saw all the astrology columns predicting that one twelfth of the population of earth will be visited by a relative who wants to borrow money. I saw all the signs forbidding entrance and exit but none forbidding arson or murder. I saw all the carpets with cigarette burns and all the kneecaps with carpet burns. I saw all the worms dissected by curious children and eminent scientists. I saw all the polar bears and the koala bears used to describe fat people you just want to cuddle. I saw all the ugly men hitting on all the happy women who made the mistake of smiling at them. I saw inside all the mouths and it's really disgusting in there. I saw all the bird's eye views of all the birds who think humanity looks pretty active for a bunch of toilet heads..."
- Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

"If you're Australian, you will at least have heard of Terry Dean. If you aren't, you won't have, because while Australia is an eventful place, what goes on there is about as topical in world newspapers as 'Bee Dies In New Guinea After Stinging Tree By Mistake.' It's not our fault. We're too far away. That's what a famous Australian historian once called 'the tyranny of distance.' What he meant was, Australia is like a lonely old woman dead in her apartment; if every living soul in the land suddenly had a massive coronary at the exact same time and the Simpson Desert died of thirst and the rainforests drowned and the barrier reef bled to death, days might pass and only the smell drifting across the ocean to our Pacific neighbors would compel someone to call the police. Otherwise we'd have to wait until the Northern Hemisphere commented on the uncollected mail."
- Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

"Most of my life I never worked out whether to pity, ignore, adore, judge, or murder my father. His mystifying behavior left me wavering right up until the end. He had conflicting ideas about anything and everything, especially my schooling: eight months into kindergarten he decided he didn't want me there anymore because the education system was 'stultifying, soul-destroying, archaic, and mundane.' I don't know how anyone could call finger painting archaic and mundane. Messy, yes. Soul-destroying, no."
- Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

"Late in the evening, long after the fight, long after Sinatra gave a fight eulogy for [Ali] in the showroom and all the people applauded, I walked into the men's room on the first floor at Caesars... and there was an old Afro-American gentlemen handling the towels and everything else.

And I said to the guy , 'You mind if I ask you a question? Did you bet on this fight?'

He said, 'Yes I did.'

'You mind telling me who you bet on?'

And he looked at me and he said, 'I bet on Muhammad Ali.'

'You mind telling me why?'

He said, 'Why? Because he gave me my dignity.'"
- Jerry Izenberg, Muhammad & Larry (2009)

"Maybe in the old days someone would've mumbled about Shaw's lack of loyalty, but these were the new days, and everyone understood that an athlete did what he could to maximize his earning power. Ten years earlier, after all, a rookie named Kevin McHale had threatened to play in Italy because he didn't like the Celtics' contract offer. And Bird had boycotted media day two years earlier because he was unhappy with his contract.

'Why should I be mad at Brian?' McHale said when asked why there was no animosity directed at Shaw. 'Look, if he made it personal, if he came out and said, 'I'm not playing because I hate Kevin McHale,' then it would be different.'

'Actually, Kevin,' a reporter told him, 'that's exactly what he did say.'

'Where is that cocksucker?' said McHale, bolting out of his seat."
- Jack McCallum, Unfinished Business

"Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
- Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

"[Manute Bol] was breathtaking in person, and not just because of his surreal height and skin so dark that it made him seem purple. [85]
85. Our country is so uptight that this point might be considered racist. Here’s my defense: Manute Bol was fucking purple. I don’t know what else to tell you."
- Bill Simmons, The Book of Basketball

"I was supposed to have spent my twenties (a) hammering away for ninety hours a week at some high-paying, ethically dubious job, drinking heavily, and having explosive sex with a rich array of twenty-something men; (b) awaking at noon every day in my Williamsburg loft to work on my painting/poetry/knitting/performance art, easily shaking off the effects of stylish drugs and tragically hip clubs and explosive sex with a rich array of twenty-something men (and women if I could manage it); or (c) pursuing higher education, sweating bullets over an obscure dissertation and punctuating my intellectual throes with some pot and explosive sex with a rich array of professors and undergrads. These were the models, for someone like me."
- Julie Powell, Julie & Julia

"1. Or at a Lakers game, where you can hear Kobe bitching out teammates and coaches! That reminds me of the highlight of the '08 Finals: Matt Damon cheering the Celts in Game 5 when Phil Jackson turned and hissed, "Sit down and shut the fuck up!" Had they won, I think I would've sacrificed a pinky for Damon to snap into Will Hunting mode and pull the "Hey, Phil, you like apples? . . . How 'bout them apples?" routine."
- Bill Simmons, The Book of Basketball

"All of which is to say that if Edith Wharton came back from the dead, developed a bent for municipal power brokers, cops, crackheads and reportage, and didn't really care what she wore to the office, she'd probably look a little something like David Simon."
- Richard Price, foreword to David Simon's Homicide

"To hear it with the logic of the external world, the threats and counterthreats sound like a prelude to war. But on Fayette Street, this is business as usual. It's gut-level knowledge for all of them: Two boys get to beefing, throwing words, posturing, talking about how they're gonna come back with their Tec-Nine, and everyone else stands around for a minute or two trying to gauge whether the wait is worth the show. The bluster and brinkmanship is constant, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the thing ends with traded insults and maybe an unkept promise to come back with a gun or an older brother or the rest of whatever corner crew is involved. The hundredth time someone comes back in the worst way, but that's what the corner is about. And when the worst finally happens, of course, a homicide detective is left standing over the corpse, trash talking with his partner about the stupidity of the victim, about how the shooter promised to come back with a gun and the victim didn't do shit but wait for him. But the cop doesn't understand: In his world, the threat of a gun would be an epic event, something to bring the adrenaline to a boil. In West Baltimore, a suggestion of violence is the standard terminus to any dispute lasting longer than four minutes."
- David Simon and Edward Burns, The Corner