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

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.

If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

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.

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

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.