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

We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.

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

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.

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

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.

Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.

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

If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.

To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will never know it

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.

The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.

Tell me, Anna, if man is capable of projecting his belief onto the cosmos, isn't it possible by the same token, that he can project his unbelief onto the cosmos?

Ask any child who failed to live up to his parents’ idea of success, and you’ll likely hear that they never felt good enough, or that their parents had expectations that they could not live up to.

for the poor the whole world is a self-constituted critic; your smallest action is open to debate. No secret place of your soul is safe from invasion.

I think anytime you start relying on a format to get you by you've got weak material to begin with.

How is it that the Church produced no geometer in her autocratic reign of twelve hundred years?

No other road, no other way, No day but today!

Unlike curing cancer or heart disease, we already know how to beat hunger: food.

We are the Love, loving.

You have to turn over a lot of rocks to find those little anomalies. You have to find the companies that are off the map - way off the map.