quotes at random, no. 32 - profiles

[fiefoe]

"After four months," Biedalak says sadly, "you sometimes get a reply to some sentence in an email that has been scrambled in his incremental reading process."

"I kept thinking," Orr recalls, "How does he know? Because it's under heavy plastic tarp in our driveway."
If Rove has ever displayed weakness to an enemy—or to a friend—the occasion went unrecorded. Even his wife once told a reporter that he knocked her croquet ball so hard on vacation that it made her cry.

“We’ve had to yell at him: start the break, start the break — then do your finger wag!”
__ “We can give him this fire hose of data and let him sift. Most players are like golfers. You don’t want them swinging while they’re thinking.”
__ Battier looked back to see the ball drop through the basket and hit the floor. In that brief moment he was the picture of detachment, less a party to a traffic accident than a curious passer-by. And then he laughed. The process had gone just as he hoped. The outcome he never could control.

His parents, both psychologists, decided formal training might be a good idea after they saw that their son had strung rubber bands across his dresser drawers and was replicating classical tunes by ear, moving drawers in and out to vary the pitch.

In her inimitable way, she captured the spirit of each in one-sentence inscriptions. In "Alice in Wonderland," she offered, "Here's to six impossible things before breakfast." For "The Wind in the Willows," it was, "May you have Toad's zest for life." And in "The Little Prince," she wrote, "May your heart always see clearly."

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