"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.”

“Unlike most, a ball player must confront two deaths. First, between the ages of thirty and forty he perishes as an athlete. Although he looks trim and feels vigorous and retains unusual coordination, the superlative reflexes, the major league reflexes, pass on. At a point when many of his classmates are newly confident and rising in other fields, he finds that he can no longer hit a very good fast ball or reach a grounder four strides to his right. At thirty-five he is is experiencing the truth of finality. As his major league career is ending, all things will end. However he sprang, he was always earthbound. Mortality embraces him. The golden age has passed in a moment. So will all things. So will all moments.”