Everything important always begins from something trivial.

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.

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

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

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

The language we use is extremely powerful. It is the frame through which we perceive and describe ourselves and our picture of the world.

If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other causes for prejudice by noon.

I am a gentleman. My natural inclination is to be on my best behavior.

Science is not a vast encyclopedia, it is a thin flame of reason burning across ample reservoirs of ignorance.

The foolish think the Eagle weak, and easy to bring to heel. The Eagle's wings are silken, but its claws are made of steel.

The study of consciousness that can extend beyond the body is extremely important for the issue of survival, since it is this part of human personality that would be likely to survive death.

A bad hunter chases. A good hunter waits.

Practical sciences proceed by building up; theoretical science by resolving into components.

I pout my lower lip for a second, but then I grin as the pieces come together in my mind. "THAT'S why you like me!" I exclaim. "Because you're not very nice either! It makes so much more sense now.