privileged to share in the athletic power of a large and dangerous animal willing to be controlled by the small, frail strength of a mere human being. - Mary Doria Russell

"The single craziest thing about being a priest, he’d found, was that celibacy was simultaneously the most private and most public aspect of his life. One of his linguistics professors, a man named Samuel Goldstein, had helped him understand the consequences of that simple fact. Sam was Korean by birth, so if you knew his name, you knew he was adopted. "What got me when I was a kid was that people knew something fundamental about me and my family just by looking at us. I felt like I had a big neon sign over my head flashing ADOPTEE," Sam told him. "It’s not that I was ashamed of being adopted. I just wished that I had the option of revealing it myself.

He did not believe in luck at all, good or bad. Gamblers believed in luck, and he was not a gambler. Never had been, never would be. John Henry Holliday believed in mathematics, in statistics, in the computation of odds. Fifty-two cards in a deck. Make it easy. Say it's fifty. Any card has a 2 percent chance of being dealt from a full deck. Keep track of what's out. Adjust the probabilities as the hand progresses.

Have you ever thought about a Twelve Step program for people who talk too much? You could call it On and On Anon.