One day, of course, no one will remember what I remember.

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

We shouldn’t use God for our purpose alone but also be instruments of the extension of His Kingdom

Living in a galaxy is like living in a neighborhood where the house down the street might have burned down four thousand years ago but you wouldn't know it for another three thousand years.

Among mortals second thoughts are wisest.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

The only way to happiness is never to give happiness a thought.

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

I don't seem to meet very many men I find attractive. And usually when I meet them and develop crushes on them they are usually straight. So I end up having more relationships with women.

Nature insists on whatever benefits the whole.

I have to say that when I was young, when any politician was talking I wasn't even interested. Maybe they were saying some nice stuff, but then if you put Michael Jordan on TV, I was interested!

The Iraq Survey Group has already found massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories.