Quote
"I hear people say I swing at bad pitches. What is a bad pitch? If I can hit it, its not a bad pitch."
"The key play was one that might have been forgotten in the frenetic scrambling of runs. With men on second and third in the sixth and the score 5-5, Willie Mays smashed a searing low line drive into right field that seemed destined to leave the park. But the amazing Roberto Clemente leaped, glove above the railing, crashed into the wire fence and came down with the ball, as 6,028 fans first groaned in anger, then stood to applaud as fine and brave a catch as an outfielder can make."

Roberto Enrique Clemente Walker was a Puerto Rican professional baseball player who played 18 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the Pittsburgh Pirates, primarily as a right fielder. On December 31, 1972, Clemente was killed when his Douglas DC-7 airplane, which he had chartered for a flight to take and deliver emergency relief goods for the survivors of a massive earthquake in Nicaragua,
"I hear people say I swing at bad pitches. What is a bad pitch? If I can hit it, its not a bad pitch."
"If Roberto Clemente could sing, he would make Harry Belafonte wish he could hit."
"The American League must be that fountain of youth they talk about. A lot of National League pitchers did pretty good in the American League this year."
"He has these huge, strong hands. People always thought that because he hit with such power, he was this big guy. He wasnt, especially by todays standards. He came into spring training at 185 pounds. By the end of the season, he was 181. The power came from those hands."
"I played with Willie Mays and I played with Roberto Clemente, and what I see in Barry is the same ability I saw in Willie and Roberto. I see a guy who trusts himself at the plate and in the field. If I managed against Barry, I wouldnt let him beat me. I wouldnt give him the opportunity."
"I am having a plaque put on the front of my house. It will say, "To God, Mother, Father and Baseball."
"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."