When we put words together - adjective with noun, noun with verb, verb with object - we start to talk to each other.

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

I'm walking every day and just staying kind of fit, and try not to have too many bad habits. Keep it minimal.

I know people who've gone to jail. It don't mean you stop loving them! They deservin' love just as much in there, and maybe they needin' it more.

As long as I have teeth, I'll keep playing. You can't play trumpet without teeth.

Understanding a metaphor is like deciphering a code or unraveling a riddle.

Another two-bowl morning?" - Damien Maslin asking Zoey Redbird if her love of cereal was the reason she was almost late for Vamp Soc class

Did you hotwire this car?" I then rephrased my question. "Did you STEAL this car?

Perception is a clash of mind and eye, the eye believing what it sees, the mind seeing what it believes.

The best way to improve children's performance in the classroom may be to take them out of it.

Nobody goes to work to do a bad job.

When a man's ways please God, the stones of the street shall be at peace with him.