W. P. Kinsella Baseball Quotations

I knew how to read box scores and who the baseball heroes were before I had ever seen or even heard much of a game.

The crack of the bat, the sound of baseballs thumping into gloves, the infield chatter are like birdsong to the baseball starved.

Baseball is meant to be a contemplative game. They play music to draw young people to the game. If young people can't come to the game without music, then they should stay home.

He bats like a lightning rod.

It is the same game that Moonlight Graham played in 1905. It is a living part of history, like calico dresses, stone crockery, and threshing crews eating at outdoor tables. It continually reminds us of what was, like an Indian-head penny in a handful of new coins.

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.

Someone once described the pitching of a no-hit game as like catching lighting in a bottle.

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.

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.

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.

Baseball games are like snowflakes and fingerprints, no two are ever alike.