Life & Mortality Quote by Sara Paretsky

“I live and die with the Chicago Cubs” works because it’s deliberately too big for its subject. Sara Paretsky isn’t reporting a hobby; she’s claiming a lifelong allegiance to a team famous for making loyalty complicated. The line borrows the language of romance, faith, even battlefield solidarity, then pins it to baseball - an everyday entertainment that becomes, in the right city, a civic identity. That mismatch is the point: it captures how fandom turns ordinary time into high-stakes narrative, where April feels like rebirth and September can feel like betrayal.

Paretsky, best known for hardboiled crime fiction, understands devotion under pressure. “Live and die” is the vocabulary of commitment when outcomes are out of your control - the same emotional contract her readers recognize in noir: you stay, even when the odds are bad, even when the system is rigged, even when disappointment is a feature, not a bug. With the Cubs, that’s not melodrama; it’s history. For most of the modern Cubs mythos, suffering wasn’t incidental. It was the brand, the shared joke, the badge that made belonging feel earned.

The subtext is local and classically Chicago: stubbornness as virtue, endurance as personality, hope as a practiced skill. It’s also a sly declaration of solidarity. In one sentence, Paretsky aligns herself with a community that treats heartbreak as a communal ritual and loyalty as a kind of weather - something you don’t choose each day so much as live inside.