A. Bartlett Giamatti Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.

A. Bartlett Giamatti
Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else. Winning is important to any man's or woman's sense of satisfaction and well-being. Winning is not everything; but it is something powerful, indeed beautiful, in itself, something as necessary to the strong spirit as striving is necessary to the healthy character.

A. Bartlett Giamatti
All play aspires to the condition of paradise...through play in all its forms...we hope to achieve a state that our larger Greco-Roman, Judeo- Christian culture has always known was lost. Where it exists, we do not know, although we always have envisioned it as a garden...always as removed, as an enclosed green place...Paradise is an ancient dream...It is a dream of ourselves as better than we are, back to what we were.

A. Bartlett Giamatti
Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the gods.

A. Bartlett Giamatti
The university must be a tributary to a larger society, not a sanctuary from it.

A. Bartlett Giamatti
Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder. It is about restoration of the right relations among things — and going home is where that restoration occurs because that is where it matters most.

A. Bartlett Giamatti
[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.

A. Bartlett Giamatti
If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will and imagination — through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.

A. Bartlett Giamatti
Baseball…expresses our longing for the rule of law while licensing our resentment of law givers.
Meaning umpires

A. Bartlett Giamatti
Baseball is about homecoming. It is a journey by theft and strength, guile and speed, out around first to the far island of second, where foes lurk in the reefs and the green sea suddenly grows deeper, then to turn sharply, skimming the shallows, making for a shore that will show a friendly face, a color, a familiar language and, at third, to proceed, no longer by paths indirect but straight, to home.

A. Bartlett Giamatti
The people of America care about baseball, not about your squalid little squabbles. Reassume your dignity and remember that you (players during the 1981 strike) are the temporary custodians of an enduring public trust.

A. Bartlett Giamatti