Life is tough and brimming with loss, and the most we can do about it is to glimpse ourselves clear now and then, and find out what we feel about familiar scenes and recurring faces this time around.

Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.

I felt what I almost always feel when I am watching a ballgame: Just for those two or three hours, there is really no place I would rather be.

Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time.

The best defense against partisanship is expertise.

I knew I wasn't a baseball writer. I was scared to death. I really was afraid to talk to players, and I didn't want to go into the press box because I thought I was faking it.

The great thing about catchers is that they do a lot of different things, and they're basically overlooked.

What really makes baseball so hard is it's retributive capacity for disaster if the smallest thing is done wrong, and the invisible presence of defeat that attends every game.

Baseball’s absolute unpredictability makes amateurs of us all.

I think I wrote once that baseball in many ways is very much like reading. I said there are more bad books than bad ballgames, or maybe it was the other way around. I can't remember.

Those who live by the wall must die by the wall.

Don’t ever compliment me by insulting other women. That’s not a compliment, it’s a competition none of us agreed to.

We don't have time for such uncertainty because it reliably breeds indecision, and indecision is one of the mothers of failure.

Intuition knows what the mind can't see yet.

My recollection of a hundred lovely lakes has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.

Passive pleasure is no pleasure at all.

And I was going to be damned if I was older than Batman.

With a houseful of kids you give each other strength.

We have come a long way and we have a little further to go.

No yield to the dead! Never stab the fighter when he's down. Where's the glory, killing the dead twice over?

Purpose! Purposes are for animals with a hell of a lot more dignity than the human race! Just hop on that strange torpedo and ride it to wherever it's going.