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

The greatest kindness would put a bullet in his bright eye.

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

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

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.

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.