Too True

I finally got around to reading Prep (incidentally, if you accidentally search Amazon for "perp," Prep is still the first hit). Eh. But it did have this very good passage, which touches on some things I have been thinking about lately, and something that haunted me throughout my school life:

Sports contained the truth, I decided, the unspoken truth (how quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound), and it seemed hard to believe that I had never understood this before. They rewarded effortlessness and unself-consciousness; they confirmed that yes, there are rankings of skill and value and that everyone knows what they are...they showed that the best things in the world to be were young and fast.