This is not the first time in my life where you know going into a job that you're going to hear in stereo what was wrong with what you did.

A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching.

Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.

[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.

No one man is superior to the game.

Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.

Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the Gods.

For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.

Americans have been remarkably devoted to the capacity for belief, to idealism. That's why we get into trouble all the time. We're always viewed as naive.

Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they're here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.

The university is our culture's assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values.

Rock music is not meant to be perfect.

He who climbs above the cares of this world, and turns his face to his God, has found the sunny side of life.

Of course you want your son, your children, to be proud of you.

Because there is no meaning to be found in the arbitrary nature of things., It's all random. Just as space is blue. And birds fly through it.

Stop, stop, stop, you're going to poke someone's eye out!

Here I was at the end of America...no more land...and nowhere was nowhere to go but back

Says he foun' he jus' got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain't no good, 'cause his little piece of a soul wasn't no good 'less it was with the rest, an' was whole.

I am one of those authors who believes (perhaps foolishly) that she is in complete control of the story.

When you help scholars, you gain a share in their learning.

Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.