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

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.

I drive around the streetsan inch away from weeping, ashamed of my sentimentality andpossible love.

Would you care to dance?” he blurted. “Now?” She smiled adorably. “Is there music?” There wasn’t. It was some testament to how foolish in love he’d become that he did not even feel embarrassed.

You are the artistic painter of your success. Paint your life day-by-day, into a masterpiece of excellence over a lifetime.

Maturity is only a short break in adolescence.

The Catholic men are more upset about women not being able to be priests than are Catholic women.

Seeing and admitting the truth about ourselves, about our role in creating our own problems, and about how we relate to others is vital for healing.

I support the death penalty for the kingpin, the guy at the top, but I don't think you should throw a drug offender in jail for five years, and let a mugger out after a year.

When we go to our meeting with God, we should go like a patient to his doctor, first to be thoroughly examined and afterwards to be treated for our ailment. Then something will happen when you pray.

I'm like a surfer right now. I'm just surfing the wave. Except that I can't swim, so I'm on the board trying to hold on tight.

The reflection of the current social paradigm tells us we are largely determined by conditioning and conditions.