We know these men are professionals whose services are up for bid and whose bags are packed, and yet we call them our own and take personal, even civic pride in their accomplishments.

We play because we are wired for joy; it is imperative as human beings.

The caliber of play suffered and attendance declined year by year. Interest in college football was exploding, and there was this new game called basketball.

In response to the challenge of strangers, sport arose as a sublimated representation of a community's armed might as well as its pride of place and clan.

Baseball is not a conventional industry. It belongs neither to the players nor management, but to all of us. It is our national pastime, our national symbol, and our national treasure.

My egotistical concern was less that I would fail to relate to my classmates than that they would know nothing of my uniquely tortured life's course and, thus, me.

But the dream is never forgotten, only put aside and never out of reach: Where once the dream connected boys with the world of men, now it reconnects men with the spirit of boys.

Award trophies, as opposed to letting the players define and claim their own. Ultimately, pay them to play so that their activity not only resembles work but is work.

Baseball presents a living heritage, a game poised between the powerful undertow of seasons past and the hope of next day, next week, next year.

Finally, for all of us but a lucky few, the dream of playing big-time baseball is relinquished so we can get on with grown-up things.

In over 160 years of recorded baseball history, no team had ever won a championship this way.

We're all running away. Some of us just don't get very far.

It's not about ideas. It's about making ideas happen.

It was as if someone had leftthe bird thereas a kind of telegramof feathers, oily feathersthat looked like they’d struggled, shuttered a little before letting gointo flightforever.

you know this means that what we did-what we almost did in Paris-" "Going to the Eiffel Tower?

Human beings are sloshing sacks of chemicals on the move.

Capitalism is using its money; we socialists throw it away.

The Frisbee is a round disk. That's the somethingness. But it has another side; it has a nothingness which you cannot perceive with your physical mind or your senses.

It's when you cry just a little, but you laugh in the middle that you've made it.

Let it all be animal, my life and death, hard and clean like that, anything but human...a lot I care, me with my red heart in the dark earth and my tattooed feet following the animal ways.

The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.