Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.

To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will never know it

Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.

Some of us are darkness lovers. We do not dislike the early and late daylight of June, but we cherish the increasing dark of November, which we wrap around ourselves in the prosperous warmth of wood stove, oil and electric blanket. Inside our warmth we fold ourselves, partly tuber, partly bear, in the dark and its cold - around us, outside us, safely away from us. We tuck ourselves up in the comfort of cold's opposite, warming ourslves by thought of the cold, lighting ourselves by darkness's idea.

We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole.

In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty's torch. In football you run over somebody's face.

Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds.