Wp Kinsella Quotes

Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get

Hardly anybody recognizes the most significant moments of their life at the time they happen.

Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple. Within the baselines anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open. That's why they say, "the game is never over until the last man is out." Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game.

Any game becomes important when you know and love the players.

I don't have to tell you that the one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time while America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers.

She had fouled off of the curves that life had thrown at her.

God what an outfield,' he says. 'What a left field.' He looks up at me, and I look down at him. 'This must be heaven,' he says. No. It's Iowa,' I reply automatically. But then I feel the night rubbing softly against my face like cherry blossoms; look at the sleeping girl-child in my arms, her small hand curled around one of my fingers; think of the fierce warmth of the woman waiting for me in the house; inhale the fresh-cut grass small that seems locked in the air like permanent incense; and listen to the drone of the crowd, as below me Shoelss Joe Jackson tenses, watching the angle of the distant bat for a clue as to where the ball will be hit. I think you're right, Joe,' I say, but softly enough not to disturb his concentration.

Once you’ve been touched by the land, the wind never blows so cold again, because your love files the edges off it.

Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they’re good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples’ lives for them.

Growing up is a ritual, more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time.

The kind of people I absolutely cannot tolerate are those who never let you forget they are religious. It seems to me that a truly religious person would let his life be example enough, would not let his religion interfere with being a human being, and would not be so insecure as to have to fawn publicly before his gods.

Your work has been described as touching the soul of the reader. That's the way I felt. Feel. Honestly. You've touched my soul. I'm sorry if I sound like a middle-aged librarian at a book-autographing session.

If I had my life to live over again, I’d take more chances. I’d want more passion in my life. Less fear and more passion, more risk. Even if you fail, you’ve still taken a risk.

Serenity is a very elusive quality. I've been trying all my life to find it.

I have to absorb the new season like sunlight, letting it turn my winter skin pink and then brown. I must stuff myself with lore and statistics until my fingers ooze balm.

I live. I write. I watch old movies. I read. I watch the sunset. I watch the moon rise.

You have to make time, even for something as universal as staring at the stars.

I dream of things that never were,

On the north verandah is a wooden porch swing where Annie and I sit on humid August nights, sip lemonade from teary glasses, and dream.

I wonder if there are soft-spoken voices who deliver assignments to all of us in various times ... It is nice to think I have company-that others dance to the muted music I hear.

What causes all this?" "Pride. What else?

Shoeless Joe became a symbol of the tyranny of the powerful over the powerless. The name Kenesaw Mountain Landis became synonymous with the Devil.

Baseball is a ceremony, a ritual, as surely as sacrificing a goat beneath a full moon is a ritual.

The Yankees lose so seldom, you have to celebrate every single time.

I'm not trying to bleed you. I want to renew you.

Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they’re good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples’ lives for them. I don’t write autobiography.

In these days when anything goes in literature, movies, and even TV, to think there are some places so isolated, so backward, so ill-informed as to what’s going on in the world

Perhaps crossing the barriers of time has freed me.

I am more than a little jealous that the wonder I am party to has been sprinkled over Salinger's gray head.

Sandor Boatly had never guessed that, properly played, baseball consisted of mathematics, geometry, art, philosophy, ballet, and carnival, all intertwined like the mystical ribbons of color in a rainbow.

Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they're good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear.

He pops a bat twice more on home plate, then tosses a ball in the air and swings. The crack of the bat sounds like a paper bag exploding, yet the sound is cold and lonely, too, like a hunter firing on an endless tundra.

He cranks up his arm, rears back, and throws, and the ball, taking an even more perfect path than it took off the bat, travels in a white arc, seeming to leave behind a line like a streak of forgotten rainbow as it drops over the fence, silent as a star falling into a distant ocean.

Praise the name of baseball. The word will set captives free. The word will open the eyes of the blind. The word will raise the dead. Have you the word of baseball living inside you? Has the word of baseball become part of you? Do you live it, play it, digest it, forever? Let an old man tell you to make the word of baseball your life. Walk into the world and speak of baseball. Let the word flow through you like water, so that it may quicken the thirst of your fellow man.

It is a fact that there are cracks in time," my father repeated endlessly. "Weaknesses --- fissures, if you like --- in the gauzy dreamland that separates the past from the present.

It's too bad there are no Hallmark cards saying, "Sorry your loved one was killed by a foul ball.

I’m 36 years old, I love my family, I love baseball, and I’m about to become a farmer. But until I heard The Voice, I’d never done a crazy thing in my whole life.

I know that some of us, and for some reason I am one of them, get to reach out and touch our heart's desire, like a child who gets to pet the nose of an old horse, soft as satin, safe as a grandfather's lap. And I know, too, that when most people reach for that heart's desire, it appears not as a horse but as a tiger, and they are rewarded with snarls, frustration, and disillusionment.