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Baseball is a team game but, at the same time, it's a very lonely game: unlike in soccer or basketball, where players roam around, in baseball everyone has their little plot of the field to tend. When the action comes to you, the spotlight is on you but no one can help you.
--
Chad Harbach
#Basketball
#Soccer
#Baseball
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People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.
--
Chad Harbach
#Opposites
#People
#Becoming
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To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.
--
Chad Harbach
#Writing
#Ideas
#Parent
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For many years I didn't have health insurance.
--
Chad Harbach
#Years
-
The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.
--
Chad Harbach
#Form
#Novel
#Mediums
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I play American football every Saturday, which I find calming.
--
Chad Harbach
#Football
#Play
#Calming
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It remained an open question, how much sympathy love could stand.
--
Chad Harbach
-
Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
--
Chad Harbach
#Different
#Fiction
#Process
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Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.
--
Chad Harbach
#Achieve
#Novel
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Tall people have a real advantage in the world.
--
Chad Harbach
#Real
#People
#World
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Every dude in your high school wasn't striving to be the best poet because then he'd get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.
--
Chad Harbach
#Girl
#School
#Imagine
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Writing on a computer feels like a recipe for writer's block. I can type so fast that I run out of thoughts, and then I sit there and look at the words on the screen, and move them around, and never get anywhere. Whereas in a notebook I just keep plodding along, slowly, accumulating sentences, sometimes even surprising myself.
--
Chad Harbach
#Notebook
#Running
#Block
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... people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering.
--
Chad Harbach
#Keys
#Long
#People
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You are skilled. I exhort you.
--
Chad Harbach
-
Other things awaited. It was good to be young and to know it for once. So much unfolding to do.
--
Chad Harbach
#Unfolding
#Young
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I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.
--
Chad Harbach
#Mean
#People
#Support
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He already knew he could coach. All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story.
--
Chad Harbach
#Sports
#Player
#Guy
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There are no whys in a person's life, and very few hows. In the end, in search of useful wisdom, you could only come back to the most hackneyed concepts, like kindness, forbearance, infinite patience. Solomon and Lincoln: This too shall pass. Damn right it will. Or Chekhov: Nothing passes. Equally true.
--
Chad Harbach
#Kindness
#Infinite
#Chekhov
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The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.
--
Chad Harbach
#Alive
#Someday
#Human Condition
-
But people didn't forgive you for doing what felt right-that was the last thing they forgave you for.
--
Chad Harbach
#Forgiveness
#People
#Forgiving
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There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.
--
Chad Harbach
#Three
#Return
#Stage
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In fact, theres a lot to legitimately hate about pro sports and the way they are conducted.
--
Chad Harbach
#Sports
#Hate
#Way
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But baseball was different... You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you f****d up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error, but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see? ... You could only try so hard not to try too hard before you were right back around to trying too hard. And trying hard, as everyone told him, was wrong, all wrong.
--
Chad Harbach
#Sports
#Baseball
#Errors
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There are things you do when you're writing that are so fun to do it's almost like they're private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you're going to have to take them out in the end.
--
Chad Harbach
#Fun
#Writing
#Worry
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Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he's wrong.
--
Chad Harbach
#Life
#Believe
#Issues
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It was strange the way he loved her; a side long and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention.
--
Chad Harbach
#Love
#Long
#Matter
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Heat radiated off Henry's face. Salty snot ran down his upper lip. A majestic fart propelled him to the top of Section 12, just at the springing of the stadium's curve. He slapped the sign as if high-fiving a teammate. It gave back a game shudder. He was crusing now, darkness be damned, stripping off his sweatshirt and his long underwear top without breaking stride.
--
Chad Harbach
#Running
#Curves
#Games
