Baseball -and I mean professional baseball- has got damned near every problem that churches and religion have got.
The thing i found offensive, the thing i hated about mohican-mountain-makers, gill-netters, poachers, whalehunters, strip-miners, herbicide-spewers, dam-erectors, nuclear-reactor-builders or anyone wh...
But Mama was so mad at the insurance company that even though he used words like flaming assholes she didn’t realize till later that he was cussing: she said she thought he was quoting the Psalms.
When Peter renounced the world he grew up in and the people he grew up with, I believe it was exactly as heroic as that of a person who, finding himself prone to violent seasickness, renounces yachtin...
She might be all right, Freddy said. But she sure is dead.
Religious laws, in all the major religious traditions, have both a letter and a spirit. As I understand the words and example of Jesus, the spirit of the law is all-important whereas the letter, while...
Punctuationally speaking, wonder is a period at the end of a statement we've long taken for granted, suddenly looking up and seeing the sinuous curve of a tall black hat on its head, and realizing it...
Peter didn’t want to change the world: he wanted to fully comprehend it.
Perhaps [God] resided only above England. Or perhaps He had retired and now lived quietly in some remote Condominium Galaxy where He enjoyed a game of intergalactic golf now and again, deftly driving,...
People who vote for candidates bought by private business interests are not politically free in any real sense.
Papa was no longer fixing a carburetor: he was setting up a greasy little Cuban missile base smack-dab in the middle of Mama’s immaculate Washington, D.C. It was a flagrant act of war.
Life is short. It's God's fault. Sorry.
I’m just saying that his card-burning would have meant far more, on the day he did it, if he hadn’t already incinerated his life.
I wish there really was such a thing as a Time-Clock Puncher, though. I wish some gigantic, surly, stone-fisted Soap Mahoney-type guy went around the world smashing every clock in sight till there wer...
I call hellfire a threat, Natasha said, and ‘love thy neighbor’ a value. But I believe in hell, or something close to it. I think hell is what we get right here on earth when people trade their spiri...
Baseball is not life. It is a fiction, a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake.
All human giving is fiction giving. Only the Absolute nonfictively owns; hence only the Absolute can nonfictively give; hence the mortal who believes that he or she owns, stands no chance of receiving...
That was the thing about nature: make one lousy rule to describe it and it'll contradict you even if it has to transmogrify and metamorphosize and bust its ass to do it. and so what? if anybody grew w...
Words in books can remind us of truth, and help awaken us to it. But in themselves, words are just paint and writers are just painters . . . Let us not overestimate the power of any form of literature...
Sister Durrel is so beautiful compared to everything else at Sabbath school it's like my eyeballs turn into compass needles, and she's North.