If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.

To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content.

The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.

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.

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

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

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.