"The world is never again as it was before anyone you love has ever died; never so innocent, never so fixed, never so gentle, never so pliant to your will. But these are afterthoughts. Generations vie and the young recover swiftly, or believe they do."

“I never heard a thrown ball make that sound before. The ball seemed to accelerate as it came close; an accelerating, impossibly fast pitch that made the noises of hornets and snakes.”

“No game is as verbal as baseball; baseball spreads twenty minutes of action across three hours of a day.”

“At a point of life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams.”

“Baseball skill relates inversely to age. The older a man gets, the better a ball player he was when young, according to the watery eye of memory.”

“The gracious mistress turned bitch in summer heat.”

“In the intimacy of Ebbets Field it was a short trip from the grandstand to the fantasy you were in the game.”