He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

How Far back must we go to discover the beginning of trouble?

The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.

I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

For someone whose roots in America were strong but only inches deep, and who had no experience, such as a Catholic child might, of an awesome hierarchy that was real and felt, baseball was a kind of secular church that reached into every class and region of the nation and bound millions upon millions of us together in common concerns, loyalties, rituals, enthusiasms, and antagonisms. Baseball made me understand what patriotism was about, at its best.