Cathy

“Before long four dozen balls lay scattered at the base of the fence, a harvest of dirty white fruit.”
― Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

“Putting Henry at shortstop - it was like taking a painting that had been shoved in a closet and hanging it in the ideal spot. You instantly forgot what the room had looked like before.”
― Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

“Schartz would never live in a world so open. His would always be occluded by the fact that his understanding and his ambition outstripped his talent. He'd never be as good as he wanted to be, not at baseball, not at football, not at reading Greek or taking the LSAT. And beyond all that he'd never be as _good_ as he wanted to be. He'd never found anything inside himself that was really good and pure, that wasn't double-edged, that couldn't just as easily become its opposite. He had tried and failed to find that thing and he would continue to try and fail, or else he would leave off trying and keep on failing. He had no art to call his own. He knew how to motivate people, manipulate people, move them around, this was his only skill. He was like a minor Greek god you've barely heard of, who sees through the glamour of the armor and down into the petty complexity of each soldier's soul. And in the end is powerless to bring about anything resembling his vision. The loftier, arbitrary gods intervene.”
― Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

“To reach a ball he has never reached before, to extend himself to the very limits of his range, and then a step farther, this is the shortstop's dream.”
― Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding