First crush, first kiss, first time I saw the ocean And dug my toes in the sand Baseball and summer nights, casting out when the fish first bite, First time I got a Chevy in my hands I thought nothing can touch that by a mile I thought nothing can ma...
I got scars on my face that tell some kind of story. I'm looking in the mirror, and I got one scar that's really two scars - half from a baseball bat and half from playing football in college. I'll tell you, though, after a while, your face gets so w...
He means as much as Roberto Clemente does to Latin people. Thank God I had the opportunity to know him. I wish my kids had the opportunity to be around him, because that's how I want my kids to live their lives. I want them to be like Stan Musial. No...
Baseball calls it a curve ball for a reason: you just don't know where some pitches will land. Your ace could get injured. Your golden glover could err. Your team could sit through a rain delay. Your manager could get ejected. Your bench must be broa...
One strange quality of writing about political campaigns is that it's a little like writing about a baseball game inning by inning. We presume we can say something about the final result from the state of play a third of the way through. You can when...
We knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being...
Branch Rickey: You think God likes baseball, Herb? Herb Pennock: What - ? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Branch Rickey: It means someday you're gonna meet God, and when he inquires as to why you didn't take the field against Robinson in Phil...
Nephew: I don't wanna play baseball no more. Huey Lucas: [enters back patio] Frank, we got a problem. Frank Lucas: [looks at his brother then looks back at his nephew] Well, what do you want? Nephew: I want what you got Uncle Frank. Nephew: I wanna b...
The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white...
America runs on credit darling. Why do you worry, our credit will take care of this payment. It is not saving or cash in hand that matters. We do not need cash, we just need potential. The system in the US believes in potential. That is the model of ...
The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and i...
But words mattered, more so in Newark than many other places. In a world where income and possessions were limited, words represented dignity, pride, self-worth.
A poetry professor had once defined romance to me as "bringing two people together when every force in the universe is working to keep them apart.
Agatha loved military men. Actually, she loved men in uniform. And my bowling league outfit used to drive her wild with desire.
On the Russian revolutionaries: To leave your parents, faithful and loyal subjects of the Emperor, to leave your profession, to desist from having children, to lose your fortune, and to give up your civil honor, all for revolutionary conviction, make...
I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves an...
In East Orange, initiations were completed by murdering someone, for no other reason than to prove to a tremendously cold, tremendously tight brotherhood that you possessed the hardness required to watch their backs.
Trust is something you have to practice. Someday you're going to fall in love with someone, and you need to understand what trust is all about. What you doing now is developing bad practices of betraying people's trust.
The key is to put your outrage in a place where you can get it when you need to, but not have it bubble up so much, especially when you're asked to explain new ideas or explain what you observed two people who share none of your experiences.
Younger wizards in particular went about saying that is was time magic started to update its image and that they should all stop mucking about with bits of wax and bone and put the whole thing on a properly-organised basis, with research programmes a...
[first lines] Brian: [narration voice-over] The summer I was 8 years old, five hours disappeared from my life. Five hours. Lost. Gone without a trace. Brian: [narration voice-over] Last thing I remember I was sitting on the bench at my Little League ...