W.P. Kinsella > Quotes

“Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get”
― W.P. Kinsella

“Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple. Within the baselines anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open. That's why they say, "the game is never over until the last man is out." Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“Hardly anybody recognizes the most significant moments of their life at the time they happen.”
― W.P. Kinsella

“God what an outfield,' he says. 'What a left field.' He looks up at me, and I look down at him. 'This must be heaven,' he says.

No. It's Iowa,' I reply automatically. But then I feel the night rubbing softly against my face like cherry blossoms; look at the sleeping girl-child in my arms, her small hand curled around one of my fingers; think of the fierce warmth of the woman waiting for me in the house; inhale the fresh-cut grass small that seems locked in the air like permanent incense; and listen to the drone of the crowd, as below me Shoelss Joe Jackson tenses, watching the angle of the distant bat for a clue as to where the ball will be hit.

I think you're right, Joe,' I say, but softly enough not to disturb his concentration.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“I don't have to tell you that the one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time while America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“Any game becomes important when you know and love the players.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“She had fouled off of the curves that life had thrown at her.”
― W.P. Kinsella, The Thrill Of The Grass

“Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they’re good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples’ lives for them.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“The kind of people I absolutely cannot tolerate are those who never let you forget they are religious. It seems to me that a truly religious person would let his life be example enough, would not let his religion interfere with being a human being, and would not be so insecure as to have to fawn publicly before his gods.”
― W.P. Kinsella

“Growing up is a ritual, more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“Once you’ve been touched by the land, the wind never blows so cold again, because your love files the edges off it.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“If I had my life to live over again, I’d take more chances. I’d want more passion in my life. Less fear and more passion, more risk. Even if you fail, you’ve still taken a risk.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“Your work has been described as touching the soul of the reader. That's the way I felt. Feel. Honestly. You've touched my soul. I'm sorry if I sound like a middle-aged librarian at a book-autographing session.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“A ballpark at night is more like a church than a church”
― W. P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe: Field Of Dreams

“I dream of things that never were,”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“Serenity is a very elusive quality. I've been trying all my life to find it.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“I have to absorb the new season like sunlight, letting it turn my winter skin pink and then brown. I must stuff myself with lore and statistics until my fingers ooze balm.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“On the north verandah is a wooden porch swing where Annie and I sit on humid August nights, sip lemonade from teary glasses, and dream.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“You have to make time, even for something as universal as staring at the stars.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“I live. I write. I watch old movies. I read. I watch the sunset. I watch the moon rise.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they’re good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples’ lives for them. I don’t write autobiography.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“I wonder if there are soft-spoken voices who deliver assignments to all of us in various times ... It is nice to think I have company-that others dance to the muted music I hear.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“Shoeless Joe became a symbol of the tyranny of the powerful over the powerless. The name Kenesaw Mountain Landis became synonymous with the Devil.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“Baseball is a ceremony, a ritual, as surely as sacrificing a goat beneath a full moon is a ritual.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“The Yankees lose so seldom, you have to celebrate every single time.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“I'm not trying to bleed you. I want to renew you.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“What causes all this?"

"Pride. What else?”
― W.P. Kinsella, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy

“Perhaps crossing the barriers of time has freed me.”
― W.P. Kinsella, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy

“Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they're good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“He pops a bat twice more on home plate, then tosses a ball in the air and swings. The crack of the bat sounds like a paper bag exploding, yet the sound is cold and lonely, too, like a hunter firing on an endless tundra.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe