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

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.

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.

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!"

Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.

Words seem like drops of water in a stream that has its own wholeness and its own motion.