Bones

Stray Lines. Found Wisdom.

Last Updated: 03-30-2026, 7:14 a.m., CDT

Transformation

Vincent (played by Tom Cruise): “Hey, Eddie, what are you going to do when I kick your ass?”

Fast Eddie Felson (played by Paul Newman): “Pick myself up and let you kick me again.”

Vincent: “Oh, yeah?”

Eddie: “Yeah ... Just don’t put the money in the bank, kid. Because if I don’t whip you now I’m going to whip you next month in Dallas.”

Carmen (played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio): “You mean Houston. There’s nothing coming up in Dallas.”

Eddie: “Houston. Dallas. And if not then the month after that in New Orleans.”

Vincent: “Oh yeah? What makes you so sure?”

Eddie: “Hey: I’m back!”

—The Color of Money (1986)

Collected

“The image of the dummy, the hick, is one more thing that [Larry] Bird uses to his advantage, like his jump shot, or, more to the point, his head-fake. ‘Like I tell people,’ he says, ‘I’m not the smartest guy in life, but on the basketball court I consider myself an A-plus. Not that I’m dumb. I can keep up with 90 percent of the people in this world. I just don’t explain myself to people. I want to keep ‘em guessing. The way they take me is the way they take me.”

—John Papanek, “Gifts That God Didn’t Give,” Sports Illustrated (November 9, 1981)

Purpose

“‘Do not attempt to spare my feelings,’ returned Cronshaw, with a wave of his fat hand. ‘I do not attach any exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life is there to be lived rather than to be written about. My aim is to search out the manifold experience that it offers, wringing from each moment what of emotion it presents. I look upon my writing as a graceful accomplishment which does not absorb but rather adds pleasure to existence. As for posterity — damn posterity.’”

—M. Sommerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage, Chapter XLV (Penguin Classics edition, 1992)

Resolve

I’ve make mistakes
And I’ve been hard hit
I say so what
So what if I did
I’m the clear eyed
I’m the comeback kid

Start it over
Start it over again
I’m the clear eyed
I’m the comeback kid

—The Midnight, “Comeback Kid,” Endless Summer (2016)

Love

You step outside for the morning walk and there are the geese. All the geese. Waves and waves of geese. If you lived in a Hitchcock film this scene would be scary. But it’s not scary; it’s the opposite of scary. Immediately overhead, high over your leafless maple tree, the geese are loud and proud, and this happens every year, you suppose, but never ever have you seen this many geese flying together, all at once, no, sir. More and still more join in, geese align into a decidedly upper-case V. Come one, come all, join in, wherever you are.