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“How did you know? That she wasn't the one for him?" Now he's staring at his hands, slowing rubbing them together. "They just didn't have that . . . natural magic. You know? It never seemed easy."
My voice grows tiny. "Do you think things have to be easy? For it to work?"
Cricket's head shoots up, his eyes bulging as they grasp my meaning. "NO. I mean, yes, but . . . sometimes there are ... extenuating circumstances. That prevent it from being easy. For a while. But then people overcome those ...circumstances . . . and . . ."
"So you believe in second chances?" I bite my lip.
"Second, third, fourth. Whatever it takes. However long it takes. If the person is right," he adds.
If the person is . . . Lola?"
This time, he holds my gaze. "Only if the other person is Cricket."

Chapter 27
Pg 273”
― Stephanie Perkins, Lola and the Boy Next Door

“If you took everything I’d ever found hot in a girl and piled them into a corner, you’d get Cricket Hunt standing in a corner.”
― Fisher Amelie, Greed

“I thought back to all the times I’d slept with a girl and not thought twice about it and my gut ached. If a girl doesn’t safeguard herself, who will? I’d always had the mentality that men will change when women change but I never thought about how safeguarding the girls around me was just as much my responsibility as it was theirs.”
― Fisher Amelie, Greed

“I started toward the barn and was grateful that the wind was still. About halfway up the drive, my heart began to beat an irregular rhythm as I caught sight of Cricket coming toward me. My breath caught in my throat. This girl. This tiny little girl had such incredible power over me with her big, blue, round, sad eyes. Her unusual face, her unusually striking face. Her pert nose. The faint laugh lines around her eyes and mouth. And I didn’t know her, didn’t really even know if she and I were anything alike but that didn’t stop me from wishing we shared a future...even if she did belong to someone else.”
― Fisher Amelie, Greed

“I followed suit, a little bit nervous, and very unaware of what I was supposed to do. I had that same sensation you get when you were new to a school and had no idea who anyone was in your lunch period. You’d take your lunch tray and sort of stand around for a moment looking for a good spot to take a seat but the entire time you’re searching, all you can feel is everyone’s eyes on you. That’s a shitty feeling.”
― Fisher Amelie, Greed

“You know how when you step on court your coach is like "go go go!"? And all throughout you just keep telling yourself to hit harder and harder and keep at it? You know how much you treasure those five-minute timeouts? You know how good you feel at the end of a session? You know how you're glad you're tired? No pills, no shots, just plain energy. I want to work like that. Whether I have to write ten thousand words or send five hundred emails, brainstorm for hours at a time, I want to have that energy. To keep fighting. To know it's all worth it.

Oh, yeah. That's my perfect day.”
― Thisuri Wanniarachchi

“August said you row?â€� she asked. Her voice spilled over me like warm syrup. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the drugging sensation then realized she’d asked me a question.
“Yeah,â€� I answered belatedly. Good. A short answer but it’s better than mouth diarrhea. “I row...a-uh-boat...with-uh-my teammates.â€� Superb! Just-uh-superb.”
― Fisher Amelie, Greed

“If a cigarette butt in the bottom of a beer bottle had a voice it would be the voice of Phil Tufnell.”
― Telford Vice

“I made a deal with sharks. I don't swim near them and they don't play cricket.”
― J.E. Fison

“Would that cricketers had better lines, or at least that their most famous were not also their tritest or most banal. 'This thing can be done,' said Fred Spofforth in 1882. 'We'll get 'em in singles,' George Hirst did not say twenty years later. 'You guys are history,' growled Devon Malcolm in 1994. 'You've just dropped the World Cup,' Steve Waugh may have crowed in 1999. At least two of these could have been put into the mouth of Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
― Rodney Ulyate, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“At all times and in all places, in season and out of season, time is now and England, place is now and England; past and present inter-penetrate. The best days an angler spends upon his river â€� the river which is Heraclitusâ€� river, which is never the same as the angler is never the same, yet is the same always â€� are those he recollects in tranquillity, as wintry weather lashes the land without, and he, snug and warm, ties new patterns of dry-fly, and remembers the leaf-dapple upon clear water and the play of light and the eternal dance of ranunculus in the chalk-stream. A cricket match between two riotously inexpert village Second XIs is no less an instance of timeless, of time caught in ritual within an emerald Arcadia, than is a Test at Lord’s, and we who love the greatest of games know that we do indeed catch a fleeting glimpse of a spectral twelfth man on every pitch, for in each re-enactment of the mystery there is the cumulation of all that has gone before and shall come after. Et ego in Arcadia.”
― G.M.W. Wemyss

“Those English always say, "Look before thou leap". But, as is customary with the English, that is looking the wrong way. I say, Ranga, to look before thou look. Then, when thou actually looks before thou leaps, thou will have already done the leaping up here, and the leaping will be much easier, if thou does it at all.”
― Ian B.G. Burns

“In the first Test of the 1938 Ashes series, Eddie Paynter and Stan McCabe became the first players on opposing sides to score double-centuries in the same match. Bill Brown and Wally Hammond repeated the feat in the very next Test at Lord’s. How quickly the once-unprecedented accumulates its precedents.”
― Rodney Ulyate, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“As in diamonds so in batting, perfection requires flawlessness and nowhere is a batting imperfection more quickly recognised than in the dropped catch. For this reason any innings worthy of consideration deserves to have all its flaws studied to establish whether or not it is the genuine gem or just masquerading as one under the glitter of big hitting or weight of runs.”
― Patrick Ferriday, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“With the advent Twenty20 cricket, the density of annual cricket calendar is a worrisome factor and has just gone from bad to worse!

'Thigh and hamstring strains have become clearly the most common injury in the past two years, perhaps associated with the increased amount of Twenty20 cricket...annual injury prevalence rates have exceeded 10% in the last three years, with the injury prevalence rates for fast bowlers exceeding 18%”
― John Orchard et al. and Deepak 'The Fitness Doc' Hiwale

“It seems perfectly reasonable to give the greatest weight to the longest series. South Africa were only offered a five-Test series in Australia and England when they were considered worthy opponents and when the authorities considered that sufficient crowds would allow such a series to be a viable financial option. This link between the duration of a Test series and the money it is likely to generate is a constant throughout the history of the game and has been made more complex over the last three decades by the introduction of the various one-day formats. The constant also remains that a five-Test series (six being a thing of the past) is the ultimate examination of the relative strength of two teams and the current fashion for a quick two-match ‘shoot-outâ€� can only harm the standing of Test cricket whatever the short-term financial rewards.”
― Patrick Ferriday, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“In an area so reliant on opinion there is also the matter of received opinion to consider. The old turkey of the innate beauty of left handers is probably a result of the rarer days for ‘cack-handersâ€� when Frank Woolley bestrode the shires on both sides of World War I. After a long gap, his mantle was languidly accepted in England by David Gower. But for every Woolley there was a Mead and for every Gower a Trescothick as if to balance the equation and bury the turkey.”
― Patrick Ferriday, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“If proof were needed that statistics alone are not enough in establishing value, then VT Trumper is that proof.”
― Patrick Ferriday, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“Bowling has the problem of wildly differing methods so that placing Wasim Akram against Bishan Bedi is rather like hanging a Rembrandt next to a Picasso and trying to produce a valid comparison.”
― Patrick Ferriday, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“In 2011 India’s Test team was crowned as world cricket’s leading side for the first time in its history. The foundations for this global domination can be traced to a decade earlier, when a career-defining performance by VVS Laxman helped to turn a whole series on its head as India, in the face of a seemingly unassailable deficit, staged an unbelievable recovery to go on and overpower what many considered to be the finest cricket team ever assembled.”
― Dave Wilson, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“Mark Waugh, the most fluent and aesthetically pleasing batsman of his generation but also one of the most frustrating to watch. Often, when he appeared to be a class above the rest and to have the bowling at his mercy, he would play a lazy shot to what appeared, more often than not, an innocuous delivery. And just like that his innings would be over. To make matters worse, he didn’t seem to care; he would nonchalantly wander off the field. No shaking of the head or staring back at the pitch to apportion blame. His fans had to learn to accept 30s and 40s instead of centuries and 150s. His concentration, some would say his interest, never seemed to be there in the Test arena. Despite playing some match-winning Test innings, Waugh was never quite able to shake the ‘lackadaisicalâ€� tag.”
― Sean Ehlers, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“Perhaps it is the fate of all great sporting performances to be forgotten somewhat if the team eventually loses. Would we care overly about VVS Laxman’s 281 or Ian Botham’s 149 without the efforts of Harbhajan Singh and Bob Willis who turned these great feats from potentially heroic failures to match-winning epics?”
― Keith Stael, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings