Ruth, as I remember him, had a great personality. He was a perennial b — Babe Ruth

"I could hardly wait for the next mornings news stories. Despite the defeat, I thought some praiseworthy mention would be made of my ten perfect innings. Then I had my first lesson in the cost of playing with the worlds greatest ball player. Quite properly the headlines screamed the news of Babes cracking the home run record. Vivid descriptions of his 28th homer clearing the grandstand roof. But no mention of me. Down at the end of the piece one line was given to the Boston pitcher. It said, "Hoyt pitched for Boston." I was to know another version of that incident in after years, again Ruths teammate. As our Yankee ball club pulled into tour cities, the sports pages would say, "Ruth and twenty-four other ball players arrived in town today." This was the price we paid playing with the big fellow—but it was worth it. Babe returned it to us ten times over, and none of us who played with him would ever trade that experience for all the headlines in the country."

"He is really a great outfielder, one of the greatest. He plays batters correctly, covers a lot more ground than youd think hed be able to do with his bulk, and has one of the deadliest throwing arms ever known. Besides, Babe has an accurate baseball judgment and never throws to the wrong base."

"Ruth made a grave mistake when he gave up pitching. Working once a week he might have lasted a long time and become a great star."

"Theres one thing in baseball that always gets my goat and thats the intentional pass. It isnt fair to the batter. It isnt fair to his club. Its a raw deal for the fans and it isnt baseball. By "baseball," I mean good square American sportsmanship because baseball represents America in sport. If we get down to unfair advantages in our national game we are putting out a mighty bad advertisement."

"Say, if I hadnt been sick last summer, Id have broken hell out of that home run record! Besides, the President gets a four-year contract. Im only asking for three.✱"

"You cant manage yourself, Root. How do you expect to manage others?"

"At one point a heated discussion arose over the possible interpretation of Lolita as a grandiose metaphor of the classic Europeans hopeless love for young, seductive, barbaric America. In his afterword to the novel Nabokov himself mentions this as the naive theory of one of the publishers who turned the book down. And although there cant be the slightest doubt that Nabokov did not mean to limit Lolita to that interpretation, there is no reason to exclude it as one of the novels many dimensions. The point, I felt, became obvious when one drew the line between Lolita as a delightfully frivolous story on the verge of pornography and Lolita as a literary masterpiece, the only convincing love story of our century."

"Lovely food, for rabbits, that is."

"One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved."

"[explaining to Ernie how April apologized to him] She just showed up at the factory, took off her coat, and begged me to take her. We made love in a way that Ive only ever seen in nature films."

"Love is always love, come whence it may. A heart that beats at your approach, an eye that weeps when you go away are things so rare, so sweet, so precious that they must never be despised."

"He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust — just uneasiness — nothing more. You have no idea how effective such a... a... faculty can be. He had no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even. That was evident in such things as the deplorable state of the station. He had no learning, and no intelligence. His position had come to him — why? Perhaps because he was never ill . . . He had served three terms of three years out there . . . Because triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in itself."