Not everything in old age is grim. I haven't walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel.

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

Feelings, rationale and values are the top qualities that make a person exceedingly human.

Never confuse someone else's inability to do something with its inability to be done.

Don't lock yourself away from those who care about you because you think you'll hurt them - or they'll hurt you. What point is there in being human if you don't let yourself feel anything?

In a cruel world kindness is certainly an unsafe virtue

How can you pass laws about things that nobody knows?""They do it all the time, " says Hayden. "That's what law is: educated guesses at right and wrong.

It’s true: Medium has the best web-based editor I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen them all.

Come in, dear wind, and be our guest You too have neither home nor rest.

The Curse of Knowledge: when we are given knowledge, it is impossible to imagine what it's like to LACK that knowledge.

Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils-all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness.

All lives are tales. Some spread, and grow in the telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce.