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.

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

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.

Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.

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

To grow old is to lose everything.

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