I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.

Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging...

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.

My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and...

Here’s what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full...

He was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart.

You must appreciate beauty for it to endure.

In sport the mind serves as the acolyte and apprentice of the body. Nothing interferes with the flow of the game more than the athlete who obsesses about his every move on the court. You...

I have built a city from the books I’ve read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city...

Help them, but don’t make friends with them.

I had declared in public my desire to be a writer … I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in...

Before I met the Jesuits, I’d never encountered another group who thought that intellect and arrogance were treasures beyond price and necessities in waging wars against blasphemers, heretics.

These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.

Losing well was a gift, but winning well is this stuff of the authentic manhood.

Gonzaga was the kind of place you’d not even think about loving until you’d left it for a couple of years.

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I’d rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire...

He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.

Later, long after my grandfather was dead, I would regret that I could never be the kind of man that he was. Though I adored him as a child and found myself attracted to the...

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.