For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight.

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.

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

You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.

Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.

Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.

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