Cricket Catch Quotes

The smell of the sweat is not sweet, but the fruit of the sweat is very sweet.

In cricket fielding, if catch comes right in your hand, there is no fun. You enjoy the most when you have to dive to catch the ball. This is what playfulness is all about. Difference between being a servant of someone and surrendering to someone is playfulness. Don’t make things too easy in your relationship with your spouse or children or gods. Keep the playfulness alive.

Where's school?" he shrieked at her. "I'm missing cricket practice!" For half an hour after that the hospital was in total confusion, while everyone tried to catch a five-foot corpse clothed mostly in a flying sheet, which raced up and down the corridors shrieking that it was missing cricket practice.

Me and the crickets’ve been here since five, Professor. You know what they say. Early bird catches the worm.

In any game, the game itself is the prize, no matter who wins, ultimately both lose the game.

Listen,” Cricket said reasonably. “If Queen Wasp could control me, would I be on a Wanted poster? Wouldn’t she just march me into her Hive from inside my brain? And use me to catch these two?” Morpho opened and closed his mouth a few times. “Oh, wow,” Cinnabar said. “You actually shut Morpho up for a moment. You can definitely be in my Chrysalis.

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.

From down here, it was obvious what had happened to Nettle. A huge cluster of pitcher plants was gathered right below the hill, gaping maws ready to swallow any animal that tumbled down it. Each one looked like a long green sack, tipped with stripes of dark pink around the open mouth at the top. Sundew had a collection of much smaller pitcher plants growing outside her nest to catch flies before they buzzed in and bothered her. She really didn’t like this big kind, though; it was super creepy to look at a giant pitcher plant and wonder whether there might be a dragon corpse decomposing inside it. Or, in this case, a dragon that was still very much alive and spitting mad. “GET ME OUT! GET ME OUT OF THIS THING!” Nettle shrieked. One of the plants wobbled as she slammed herself into the side. “Whoa,” Cricket said, landing beside Sundew. “She’s … in there? Why doesn’t she just fly out?” “Meeebomorp,” Bumblebee added, wide-eyed.

My claim to understanding cricket is that I know what it is like to be bowled by a nine-year-old girl and face the long walk of shame back to the pavilion, past smirking bystanders. I also understand that feeling of guilt after spilling the simplest of dolly catches, attempting to spare my blushes with the most outlandish excuses. I even know what it feels like to collide with my batting partner whilst attempting a run, losing my trousers, dignity and wicket in one very foul swoop.

CRICKET A poor little cricket Hidden in the flowery grass, Observes a butterfly Fluttering in the meadow. The winged insect shines with the liveliest colors: Azure, purple, and gold glitter on his wings; Young, handsome, foppish, he hastens from flower to flower, Taking from the best ones. Ah! says the cricket, how his lot and mine Are dissimilar! Lady Nature For him did everything, and for me nothing. I have no talent, even less beauty; No one takes notice of me, they know me not here below; Might as well not exist. As he was speaking, in the meadow Arrives a troop of children. Immediately they are running After this butterfly, for which they all have a longing. Hats, handkerchiefs, caps serve to catch him. The insect in vain tries to escape. He becomes soon their conquest. One seizes him by the wing, another by the body; A third arrives, and takes him by the head. It should not be so much effort To tear to pieces the poor creature. Oh! Oh! says the cricket, I am no more sorry; It costs too dear to shine in this world. How much I am going to love my deep retreat! To live happily, live hidden.

Robert Frost at Eighty" I think there are poems greater and stranger than any I have known. I would like to find them. They are not on the greying paper of old books or chanted on obscure lips. They are not in the language of mermaids or the sharp-tongued adjectives of vanishing. They run like torn threads along paving stones. They are cracked as the skull of an old man. They stir in the mirror at fifty, at eighty. My ear keeps trying to hear them but the seafront is cold. The tide moves in. They migrate like crows at a cricket ground. They knock at the door when I am out. I have done with craft. How can I front ghosts with cleverness, the slick glide of paradox and rhyme that transforms prejudice to brittle gems of seeming wisdom? Though I bury all I own or hold close though my skin outlives the trees though the lines fall shattering the stone I cannot catch them. They have the lilting accent of a house I saw but never entered. They are the sounds a child hears – the water, the afternoon, the sky. I watch them now trickling through the open mirror. Sometimes, but almost never we touch what we desire.

I REMEMBER the day the Aleut ship came to our island. At first it seemed like a small shell afloat on the sea. Then it grew larger and was a gull with folded wings. At last in the rising sun it became what it really was—a red ship with two red sails. My brother and I had gone to the head of a canyon that winds down to a little harbor which is called Coral Cove. We had gone to gather roots that grow there in the spring. My brother Ramo was only a little boy half my age, which was twelve. He was small for one who had lived so many suns and moons, but quick as a cricket. Also foolish as a cricket when he was excited. For this reason and because I wanted him to help me gather roots and not go running off, I said nothing about the shell I saw or the gull with folded wings. I went on digging in the brush with my pointed stick as though nothing at all were happening on the sea. Even when I knew for sure that the gull was a ship with two red sails. But Ramo’s eyes missed little in the world. They were black like a lizard’s and very large and, like the eyes of a lizard, could sometimes look sleepy. This was the time when they saw the most. This was the way they looked now. They were half-closed, like those of a lizard lying on a rock about to flick out its tongue to catch a fly. “The sea is smooth,” Ramo said. “It is a flat stone without any scratches.” My brother liked to pretend that one thing was another. “The sea is not a stone without scratches,” I said. “It is water and no waves.” “To me it is a blue stone,” he said. “And far away on the edge of it is a small cloud which sits on the stone.” “Clouds do not sit on stones. On blue ones or black ones or any kind of stones.” “This one does.” “Not on the sea,” I said. “Dolphins sit there, and gulls, and cormorants, and otter, and whales too, but not clouds.” “It is a whale, maybe.” Ramo was standing on one foot and then the other, watching the ship coming, which he did not know was a ship because he had never seen one. I had never seen one either, but I knew how they looked because I had been told. “While you gaze at the sea,” I said, “I dig roots. And it is I who will eat them and you who will not.” Ramo began to punch at the earth with his stick, but as the ship came closer, its sails showing red through the morning mist, he kept watching it, acting all the time as if he were not. “Have you ever seen a red whale?” he asked. “Yes,” I said, though I never had. “Those I have seen are gray.” “You are very young and have not seen everything that swims in the world.” Ramo picked up a root and was about to drop it into the basket. Suddenly his mouth opened wide and then closed again. “A canoe!” he cried. “A great one, bigger than all of our canoes together. And red!” A canoe or a ship, it did not matter to Ramo. In the very next breath he tossed the root in the air and was gone, crashing through the brush, shouting as he went. I kept on gathering roots, but my hands trembled as I dug in the earth, for I was more excited than my brother. I knew that it was a ship there on the

Damned right I am,” Iris said under her breath. She marched on. It was amazing how empowering a bit of profanity could be. “What will you say to her?” “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe ‘Are you out of your bloody mind?’” Marie-Claire’s mouth fell open. And then, skipping forward to catch up, she asked, “Can I watch?” Iris turned, measuring the malevolence in her eyes by the degree to which Marie-Claire drew back. “I am about one step away from clubbing you with a cricket bat,” she hissed. “No you may not watch.” Marie-Claire’s expression took on an almost reverential touch. “Does my brother know you’re so violent?” “He might by the end of the day,” Iris muttered. She picked up her speed.

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 – the river which is Heraclitus’ river, which is never the same as the angler is never the same, yet is the same always – 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.

HARRIS: It’s worth emphasizing the connection between perception and action. It’s one thing to talk about it in the context of catching a cricket ball, but when you talk about the evolutionary logic of having developed perceptual capacities in the first place, the link to action becomes even more explicit. We haven’t evolved to perceive the world as it is for some abstract epistemological reason. We’ve evolved to perceive what’s biologically useful. And what’s biologically useful is always connected—at least when we’re talking about the outside world—to actions. If you can’t move, if you can’t act in any way, there would have been very little reason to evolve a capacity for sight, for instance. SETH: Absolutely. The sea squirt—a very simple marine creature—swims about during its juvenile phase looking for a place to settle, and once it settles and starts filter feeding, it digests its own brain, because it no longer has any need for perceptual or motor competence. This is often used as an unkind analogy for getting tenure in academia. But you’re absolutely right: perception is not about figuring out what’s really there. We perceive the world as it’s useful for us to do so. This is particularly important when we think about perception of the internal state of the body, which we mentioned earlier. Brains are not for perceiving the world as it is. They didn’t evolve for doing philosophy or complex language, they evolved to guide action. But even more fundamentally, brains evolved to keep themselves and their bodies alive. The most basic cycle of perception and action doesn’t involve the outside world or the exterior surfaces of the body at all. It’s all about regulating the internal physiology of the body and keeping it within bounds compatible with survival. This gives us a clue about why experiences of mood and emotion, and the basic experiences of selfhood, have a fundamentally nonobject-like character.

Outside the snapdragons, cords of light. Today is easy as weeds & winds & early. Green hills shift green. Cardinals peck at feeders—an air seed salted. A power line across the road blows blue bolts. Crickets make crickets in the grass. We are made & remade together. An ant circles the sugar cube. Our shadow’s a blown sail running blue over cracked tiles. Cool glistening pours from the tap, even on the edges. A red wire, a live red wire, a temperature. Time, in balanced soil, grows inside the snapdragons. In the sizzling cast iron, a cut skin, a sunny side runs yellow across the pan. Silver pots throw a blue shadow across the range. We must carry this the length of our lives. Tall stones lining the garden flower at once. Tin stars burst bold & celestial from the fridge; blue applause. Morning winds crash the columbines; the turf nods. Two reeling petal-whorls gleam & break. Cartoon sheep are wool & want. Happy birthday oak; perfect in another ring. Branch shadows fall across the window in perfect accident without weight. Orange sponge a thousand suds to a squeeze, know your water. School bus, may you never rust, always catching scraps of children’s laughter. Add a few phrases to the sunrise, and the pinks pop. Garlic, ginger, and mangoes hang in tiers in a cradle of red wire. That paw at the door is a soft complaint. Corolla of petals, lean a little toward the light. Everything the worms do for the hills is a secret & enough. Floating sheep turn to wonder. Cracking typewriter, send forth your fire. Watched too long, tin stars throw a tantrum. In the closet in the dust the untouched accordion grows unclean along the white bone of keys. Wrapped in a branch, a canvas balloon, a piece of punctuation signaling the end. Holy honeysuckle, stand in your favorite position, beside the sandbox. The stripes on the couch are running out of color. Perfect in their polished silver, knives in the drawer are still asleep. A May of buzz, a stinger of hot honey, a drip of candy building inside a hive & picking up the pace. Sweetness completes each cell. In the fridge, the juice of a plucked pear. In another month, another set of moths. A mosquito is a moment. Sketched sheep are rather invincible, a destiny trimmed with flouncy ribbon. A basset hound, a paw flick bitching at black fleas. Tonight, maybe we could circle the floodwaters, find some perfect stones to skip across the light or we can float in the swimming pool on our backs—the stars shooting cells of light at each other (cosmic tag)—and watch this little opera, faults & all.

Do we need to talk about my kissing you a year ago? I’ve behaved myself for two weeks, Ellen, and hope by action I have reassured you where words would not.” Silence or the summer evening equivalent of it, with crickets chirping, the occasional squeal of a passing bat, and the breeze riffling through the woods nearby. “Ellen?” Val withdrew his hand, which Ellen had been holding for some minutes, and slid his arm around her waist, urging her closer. “A woman gone silent unnerves a man. Talk to me, sweetheart. I would not offend you, but neither will I fare well continuing the pretense we are strangers.” He felt the tension in her, the stiffness against his side, and regretted it. In the past two weeks, he’d all but convinced himself he was recalling a dream of her not a real kiss, and then he’d catch her smiling at Day and Phil or joking with Darius, and the clench in his vitals would assure him that kiss had been very, very real. At least for him. For him, that kiss had been a work of sheer art. “My husband seldom used my name. I was my dear, or my lady, or occasionally, dear wife. I was not Ellen, and I was most assuredly not his sweetheart. And to you I am the next thing to a stranger.” Val’s left hand, the one she’d just held for such long, lovely moments between her own, drifted up to trace slow patterns on her back. “We’re strangers who kissed. Passionately, if memory serves.” “But on only one occasion and that nearly a year ago.” “Should I have written? I did not think to see you again, nor you me, I’m guessing.” Now he wished he’d written, though it would hardly have been proper, even to a widow. That hand Valentine considered so damaged continued its easy caresses on Ellen’s back, intent on stealing the starch from her spine and the resolve from her best intentions. And she must have liked his touch, because the longer he stroked his hand over her back, the more she relaxed and leaned against him. “I did not think to see you again,” Ellen admitted. “It would have been much easier had you kept to your place in my memory and imagination. But here you are.” “Here we are.” Haunting a woman’s imagination had to be a good thing for a man whose own dreams had turned to nightmares. “Sitting on the porch in the moonlight, trying to sort out a single kiss from months ago.” “I shouldn’t have kissed you,” Ellen said, her head coming to rest on Val’s shoulder as if the weight of truth were a wearying thing. “But I’m lonely and sometimes a little desperate, and it seemed safe, to steal a kiss from a handsome stranger.” “It was safe,” Val assured her, seeing the matter from her perspective. In the year since he’d seen Ellen FitzEngle, he’d hardly been celibate. He wasn’t a profligate Philistine, but neither was he a monk. There had been an older maid in Nick’s household, some professional ladies up in York, the rare trip upstairs at David’s brothel, and the frequent occasion of self-gratification. But he surmised Ellen, despite the privileges of widowhood, had not been kissed or cuddled or swived or flirted with in all those days and weeks and months. “And now?” Ellen pressed. “You show up on my porch after dark and think perhaps it’s still safe, and here I am, doing not one thing to dissuade you.” “You are safe with me, Ellen.” He punctuated the sentiment with a kiss to her temple then rested his cheek where his lips had been. “I am a gentleman, if nothing else. I might try to steal a kiss, but you can stop me with a word from even that at any time. The question is, how safe do you want to be?” “Shame

Professionalism and discipline in Bombay cricket was paramount. You could be India’s leading test cricketer or the most precociously talented but the rules applied. Raghunath playing for Indian Gymkhana, has seen Ashok Mankad and Hanumant Singh as captains castigate and drop test cricketers who were even a minute late reporting for the game. The captain could merely be a respected cricketer and not necessarily a highly ranked state cricketer, but his writ would run. If Vasu Paranjpe decided to sit out a test bowler for coming late, then that was it and the test bowler would carry drinks for the day. In that respect alone Bombay was head and shoulders over Madras. Madras had a superbly organized cricket league, but their cricketers somehow never had the focus and discipline of the Bombay cricketer. Venkat was the glorious exception and for his stern discipline alone was he greatly resented by the easy going Madras cricketer. One incident remains etched in Giridhar’s memory. It was January 1972 and the second morning of the match between Madras and Mysore at the Central College grounds in Bangalore. 9 am and an hour more for play to begin, I (Giridhar) walk into the ground to chat with Venkat. He is already in full cricket gear, taking his customary practice catches. He is surrounded by only four fellow cricketers and as he takes his catches he keeps calling for the rest of his teammates to join him for practice. They all come in dribs and drabs, some still not in gear. He talks patiently and cheerfully to me but turns and lets out a fusillade at a fellow player who comes running, tucking his shirt in, and with his spiked cricket shoes in the other hand. Ask Venkat and he will tell you that no Bombay cricketer would ever take his cricket so lightly. Cricket was and is God to the middle-class Maharashtrian.

childhood flying kites and catching crickets in Indonesia.

I am breathing. Only you. I am breathing you. You are my air—always have been. Crazy as that sounds, you always have been, Sloan. You.

I don’t want to let you down.” My hands shake when I think about it. “Then don’t.” “What if I’m not who you think I am?” “And what if you are?

You’re all over me. Inside and out. When I run, I feel your breath filling my lungs. When I bathe, it’s your hands washing me, soft and wandering. When I cry, my tears are about you, us, and how I want you, need you, love you. Still. “And, when I come, it’s your face I see, your voice I hear, your name falling off my lips. It’s you. It’s only ever been you.

One of the optional subjects that we could study at Eton was motor mechanics, roughly translated as “find an old banger, pimp it up, remove the exhaust, and rag it around the fields until it dies.” Perfect. I found an exhausted-looking, old brown Ford Cortina station wagon that I bought for thirty pounds, and, with some friends, we geared it up big-time. As we were only sixteen we weren’t allowed to take it on the road, but I reckoned with my seventeenth birthday looming that it would be perfect as my first, road-legal car. The only problem was that I needed to have it pass inspection, and to do that I had to get it to a garage. This involved having an adult drive with me. I persuaded Mr. Quibell that there was no better way that he could possibly spend a Saturday afternoon than drive me to a repair garage (in his beloved Slough). I had managed to take a lucky diving catch for the house cricket team the day before, so was in Mr. Quibell’s good books--and he relented. As soon as we got to the outskirts of Slough, though, the engine started to smoke--big-time. Soon, Mr. Quibell had to have the windshield wipers on full power, acting as a fan just to clear the smoke that was pouring out of the hood. By the time we made it to the garage the engine was red-hot and it came as no surprise that my car failed its inspection--on more counts than any car the garage had seen for a long time, they told me. It was back to the drawing board, but it was a great example of what a good father figure Mr. Quibell was to all those in his charge--especially to those boys who really tried, in whatever field it was. And I have always been, above all, a trier. I haven’t always succeeded, and I haven’t always had the most talent, but I have always given of myself with great enthusiasm--and that counts for a lot. In fact my dad had always told me that if I could be the most enthusiastic person I knew then I would do well. I never forgot that. And he was right. I mean, who doesn’t like to work with enthusiastic folk?

She’s a contest I have no rules for but need to win; she’s a mountain to climb with whatever equipment I can dig up inside me; she’s a test worth taking even though I have no idea what sorts of questions I’ll discover. Somewhere inside Sloan, beyond the miles of upheaval and confusion she’s wrestling with, sits a beautiful soul at ease.

china eyes and furry countenance confront the nymph’s large eyes—gray eyes that now are black, for she with controlled agitated glance explores the insect’s face and all’s a-quiver with significance. It is Goya’s scene of the tame magpie faced by crouching cats. Butterflies do not need home advice. As though the admiring nymph were patent-leather cricket singing loud or gnat-catching garden-toad, the swallow- tail bewitched and haughty,

Damned right I am,” Iris said under her breath. She marched on. It was amazing how empowering a bit of profanity could be. “What will you say to her?” “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe ‘Are you out of your bloody mind?’” Marie-Claire’s mouth fell open. And then, skipping forward to catch up, she asked, “Can I watch?” Iris turned, measuring the malevolence in her eyes by the degree to which Marie-Claire drew back. “I am about one step away from clubbing you with a cricket bat,” she hissed. “No you may not watch.” Marie-Claire’s expression took on an almost reverential touch. “Does my brother know you’re so violent?

SEVEN YEARS AGO… “You notice anything different about Ash?” my cousin Sawyer asked as he climbed up the tree to sit beside me on our favorite limb overlooking the lake. I shrugged, not sure how to answer his question. Sure, I’d noticed things about Ash lately. Like the way her eyes kind of sparkled when she laughed and how pretty her legs looked in shorts. But there was no way I was confessing those things to Sawyer. He’d tell Ash, and they’d both laugh their butts off. “No,” I replied, not looking at Sawyer for fear he’d be able to tell I was lying. “I heard Mom talking to Dad the other day, saying how you and me would start noticing Ash differently real soon. She said Ash was turning into a beauty, and things between the three of us would change. I don’t want things to change,” Sawyer said with a touch of concern in his voice. I couldn’t look at him. Instead I kept my eyes fixed on the lake. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Ash is Ash. Sure, she’s always been pretty, I guess, but that’s not what’s important. She can climb a tree faster than either of us, she baits her own hook, and she can fill up water balloons like a pro. The three of us have been best friends since preschool. That won’t change.” I chanced a glance at Sawyer. My speech sounded pretty convincing, even to me. Sawyer smiled and nodded. “You’re right. Who cares that she’s got hair like some kind of fairy princess? She’s Ash. Speaking of water balloons, could you two please stop sneaking out and throwing them at cars right outside my house at night? My parents are gonna catch y’all one of these days, and I won’t be able to get y’all outta trouble.” I grinned, thinking about Ash covering her mouth to silence her giggles last night when we’d snuck down there to fill up the balloons. That girl sure loved to break rules--almost as much as I did. “I heard my name.” Ash’s voice startled me. “You two better not still be making fun of me about this stupid bra Mama’s making me wear. I’ve had it with the jokes. I’ll break both your noses if it doesn’t stop.” She was standing at the bottom of the tree with a bucket of crickets in one hand and a fishing pole in the other. “Are we gonna fish or had y’all rather just stare down at me like I’ve grown another head?

I think a good life will be like a great game of cricket. You need to go out there on the pitch and try to score as many glorious runs as possible within the inning. Undoubtedly challenges will try to bowl you out as quickly as possible perhaps even in your first over; undoubtedly there will be opponents crouched behind and lurking all around the pitch waiting to catch you out.But take some chances anyway; don't stay forever behind your crease , blocking and protecting your wicket. Hit some astounding sixes , steal some dangerous runs.

Jasmine thought of her powers, her real powers, as coming from a fifth element, a quintessential world that was everywhere but for most people remained just out of sight. Something there and then not there, something almost remembered and then almost instantly forgotten. A moment of sudden, releasing happiness out of nowhere, or something caught out of the corner of an eye, or felt somewhere behind them, a split second before they turned to look. For Jasmine it was just outside the door. An unimaginable world she imagined, believed she had been led to imagine, as being like the air above a great river, the almost wordless voices from there which told her things, as free and as fleet in that element as fishes. And who teased her sometimes about that, giggling then like children, effortlessly just out of reach, catch me if you can. And she knew that one day she would. She had no doubt that that world existed. Everything else to Jasmine was a struggle upstream until we got there. That was coming home.