Steven Lessard

“Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.”
― John Updike, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu: John Updike on Ted Williams: A Library of America Special Publication

“I took it, though, as an evil omen that the deck wasn’t cutting in our favor, and then was certain of it when the notorious Iraqi exile and convicted swindler Ahmed Chalabi charged onto the stage. Frankly, Chalabi was the last thing I needed. A University of Chicago and MIT grad, Chalabi had been convicted in Jordan for bank embezzlement. Resurrected by the CIA after the Gulf War, he now owed his political existence to Washington. It was our F-16s that kept Saddam from grabbing and lynching him; it was the United States he ran to when things got ugly. By rights, Chalabi should have been America’s obedient proxy who slavishly followed my orders. Instead, he treated me as if I were the mad uncle in the attic. He would pretend to listen to me, but as soon as I was out the door, he’d revert to his old conniving self.”
― Robert B. Baer, The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins

“While susceptibility varies, addiction can happen to any of us, through a subtle process where the bonds of degradation are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”
― Charlie Munger, "Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger"

“In life there isn’t always such an easy resolution. One has to treat people as responsible for their actions, and yet also recognize that they can’t help what they do. It’s always easier to regard others from the outside. But one can also try to imagine them as they experience themselves, as we all do, from the inside. Then it becomes possible to see that we all deserve mercy.”
― Emanuel Derman, Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life