LIFE WAS GOOD. Life was grand. I even had a sort of girlfriend, though I didn’t have much time for her. I was happy, maybe as happy as I’d ever been, and happiness can be dangerous. It dulls the senses.

filial

Like me, he read compulsively about war.

Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.

A soldier in shoes is only a soldier. But in boots he becomes a warrior.

When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about.

few ideas are as crazy as my favorite thing, running. It’s hard. It’s painful. It’s risky. The rewards are few and far from guaranteed. When you run around an oval track, or down an empty road, you have no real destination. At least, none that can fully justify the effort. The act itself becomes the destination. It’s not just that there’s no finish

Dear Carter, Did you ever leave Shangri-La? I’m an accountant now and giving some thought to blowing my brains out.

Johnson was Four Factor, because he tended to exaggerate and therefore everything he said needed to be divided by four.