Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.

I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.

Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.

Joe DiMaggio batting sometimes gave the impression, the suggestion that the old rules and dimensions of baseball no longer applied to him, and that the game had at last grown unfairly easy.

Every now and then I meet someone certain of personal greatness. I want to pat this person on the shoulder and mutter comforting words: "Things will get better! You won't always feel so depressed! Cheer up!"

I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.

To grow old is to lose everything.