A martyr's disciples suffer more than the martyr.
Americans have been remarkably devoted to the capacity for belief, to idealism. That's why we get into trouble all the time. We're always viewed as naive.
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.
Baseball is about homecoming. It is a journey by theft and strength, guile and speed, out around first to the far island of second, where foes lurk in the reefs and the green sea suddenly grows deeper, then to turn sharply, skimming the shallows, making for a shore that will show a friendly face, a color, a familiar language and, at third, to proceed, no longer by paths indirect but straight, to home.
A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching.
There are a lot of people who know me who can't understand for the life of them why I would got to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew.
Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.
Gentlemen, we are being killed on the beaches. Lets go inland and be killed.
It seems inconceivable that a species of human could possess fully modern language and not be fully modern in all other ways, too. For this reason, the evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today.
There is a penalty for trying to knock down a cockpit door, but it's the people who try to go from coach to 1st class they really beat up.
I don't profess any religion; I don't think it's possible that there is a God. . . . My books are about killing God.