W. P. Kinsella Quotes

I'd experienced the '40s and '50s by looking at my grandparents' old clothes, books, and magazines.

For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight.

It was for the sake of what had been, rather than what was.

Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it's still being made all over the place, all the time.

As I look at the barn in my ninth decade, I see the no-smoking sign, rusted and tilting on the unpainted gray clapboard. My grandfather, born in 1875, milked his cattle there a century ago.

I kind of wish I would have been able to see the old Yankee Stadium after seeing the new one.

I miss the 1980s era.

I think baseball was really reality when I was a freshman in high school.

Quite like old times,' the room says.

Just like every other kid in my grade school, I was listening to my little radio plug in my ear when Mickey Mantle hit 18 post-season homers and won series after series for the Yankees. I listened and I learned from that. I think he was the original 'Mr. October,' but thank god it didn't stick.

If anybody else says it's like old times, I'll jump out the window.

I am in fact a Hobbit in all but size. I like gardens, trees, and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humor (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.

Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.

Lou Brock, along with Maury Wills, are probably the two players most responsible for the biggest change in the game over the last fifteen years - the stolen base.

Man, I did love this game. I'd have played for food money... I used to love traveling on the trains from town to town. The hotels... brass spittoons in the lobbies, brass beds in the rooms. It was the crowd, rising to their feet when the ball was hit deep. Shoot, I'd play for nothing!

Those yesterdreams were just a cruel and foolish game we used to play, yester-me, yester-you, yesterday.

We have but the memories of past good cheer, we have but the echoes of departed laughter. In vain we look and listen for the mirth that has died away. In vain we seek to question the gray ghosts of old-time revelers.

Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and - as George Orwell said - “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist” and if we get our way - Shakespeare still read even in school.

My dad talked a good game. [I'm as a] child got only the World Series on the radio.

Do you know the nicest thing about looking at pictures of a 1950's baseball park? The only people wearing baseball caps are the players.

The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and what could be again.

More than anything, it's a game of innocence. Politicians may come and go, but they always get booed at the ballpark.

They only delivered the newspaper once a week where I lived in Oklahoma, and those people lived and died with the box score of my games. My biggest moment was winning the World Series because everyone in my town was able to feel he was a world champion.

The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.