Baptists From The United States

"He followed us around watching Clemente and we used to go out a lot together and eat after a game. It got to be funny. I'd say how bad Clemente looked. He'd say "I'll get in touch with you after the season. You've lost a ballplayer. We're a cinch to finish last and get first draft choice." Yes, I know Clemente thought we were really trying to make him look bad. I now kid him about it all the time. If he did good and I didn't play him the next night, he wouldn't speak to me. Like a petulant kid."

"Hide is not actually the right word. I had no orders from Buzzy Bavasi not to play him. Just to use him sparingly. There was no conspiracy to make him look bad. There's no way to make Clemente look bad. We had three veteran outfielders at Montreal – Sandy Amoros, Dick Whitman and Gino Cimoli – and Buzzy said use Clemente sparingly. He was my fourth outfielder and whenever I was forced to use him, he looked great. He was colorful ... and got better ... and better ... and better. We tried to sneak him through the draft, but it didn't work."

"This boy can do everything. In a couple of years, I'll bet he'll be a star."

"Another wonderful prospect. Why, he's only 19; can you imagine what he'll be like a few years from now? But I don't know if we can hold him. scouted him and I'm pretty sure the Pirates intend to draft him."

"This boy can throw like hell, he can run like hell, and he's got real good power. He is an unusually well coordinated athlete for his age and lack of experience. He'll be with us all year and you may see a lot of him."

"People in Pittsburgh don’t really know what they have in Clemente. He’s the best all-around ballplayer I have ever seen."

"Dale doesn't rate his own club as a contender. However, he feels that Pittsburgh will be greatly improved over its 1956 form. He likes the pitching. He raves about Roberto Clemente, the hard-hitting outfielder, and he has many favorable words to say of second baseman Bill Mazeroski. He feels that Clemente, the third leading batsman in the league last season at the tender age of 22, will become one of the great stars. He told a funny story about this serious-minded Puerto Rican youth. Clemente was at bat with the bases full, two out and the count three and one. Manager Bobby Bragan flashed the take sign. Clemente planted the next pitch out of the park for a grand-slam. Bragan appreciated the four runs, but all the same he wanted to know why Clemente hadn't obeyed the signal. He asked him. Clemente. speaking in fractured English, said. "Oh, I see take sign. So I take ball, and hit it just as far as I can.""

"I saw some great players, including Willie Mays. DiMaggio was a super talent. A guy I really liked was Clemente 'cause I managed him in Puerto Rico. He's one of the superstars of all time. I'll take Mays, Clemente, Williams, DiMaggio—they were so super. Those are the four guys I really felt were something special."

""I’ll bet you Harry Dalton would trade half his ballclub for Clemente,” Don Leppert, the Pirates’ first-base coach, said. “He’d probably split the clubhouse down the middle, and give us a choice of either side, to get that guy into an Oriole uniform.” Leppert’s only regret is that Clemente didn’t have the chance to truly excel in the field. Other than his eye-popping throw to the plate in the sixth game, Clemente was required to field no more than ordinary chances. "Brooks Robinson had that great Series with the glove in 1970,” Leppert said, “but you’ve got to be lucky to field like he did. By that, I mean you’ve got to get the tough chances, and if Roberto had had some in this Series, he really would have shown them something.”"

"He was the best in so many aspects of the game. He could go from first to third as fast as any player I saw or played against, and that included some of the best – Lou Brock, Maury Wills and Willie Davis."

"I think all these things are a myth about Roberto. It has to be that because he just isn't the kind of guy who would beg off anything unless he didn't feel well. He has played lots of times when he shouldn't have. He is definitely one of the leaders on this club. He's been around a long time and he knows what he's talking about. A lot of times he talks about the other hitters in our clubhouse meetings. He's thinking about something all the time. He really is one of the better ballplayers I've seen since I've been around. He has all the essentials, ability, hustle and desire. That's why it's a bit hard to understand some of these things which have been said."

". And as good a player as Sosa is, I would have to say that Clemente was better. He had everything you looked for in a player—ability to hit, run, throw, and he was a good base-stealer. He could get that extra base for you. He was the spark of the ballclub, and a very unselfish player."

"Clemente was a Berra-type hitter. He could hit the pitch out of the strike zone and hit it with a lot of power. He had a unique batting stance and stride. He would step in the bucket once in a while but had great control."

"Even though 1960 was exciting, I never felt that Pirate team could have touched the old Dodgers talent-wise – not by one iota. But I will say that Roberto Clemente was the best right fielder I ever saw."

"Roberto also tried to get Mazeroski to stay in baseball longer. Bill was having problems with his weight, and just thought he couldn’t continue to fight the battle anymore. It was in his genes. His mother was very overweight, and Bill battled his weight from start to finish. Clemente told him, "Cash is OK and Stennett is OK, but you’re still a better second baseman. You can come down to Puerto Rico with me and get in shape." Bill told him, "I think I can still play, but I can’t fight this weight thing anymore." Maz had his own pride. But he didn’t understand the pride thing with Clemente. Clemente was painting a picture every time he played. He didn't want to play unless he could perform at his absolute best."

"Florida's Southern all right. Why North Florida and South Georgia are about the same, same folks, same ways, same ways of making a living. Florida is a Southern state sharing the fate of the South. Of course, North Florida and South Florida are different. There are a lot of Northerners in the South and they're different from the old farm and plantation folks in the North. They usually say down here that Ocala is about the dividing line."

"Now that I'm angry at Harold, it's hard to remember what was so remarkable about him."

"I saw what I had been fighting for: it was for me, a scared child..."

"That was the night, in the kitchen, that I realized I was no better than who I was... And I no longer felt angry at Waverly. I felt tired and foolish, as if I had been running to escape someone chasing me, only to look behind and discover there was no one there."

"Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever."

"On the third day after someone dies, the soul comes back to settle scores. In my mother's case, this would be the first day of the lunar new year. And because it is the new year, all debts must be paid, or disaster and misfortune will follow."

"I have always known a thing before it happens."

"It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate."

"I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix?"

"Why are you attracted only to Chinese nonsense?"

"Look at this face. Do you see my foolish hope?"

"Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines."

"You see what power is – holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them."

"My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the World of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco. "Libby-ah," she'll say to me. "Guess who I see yesterday, you guess." And I don't have to guess that she's talking about someone dead."

"Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming — well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate. Isn’t that true?"

"I don't feel the need to be a role model, it's just something that's been thrust upon me. Teachers and a lot of Asian-American organizations, for example, say to me, "We need you to come and speak to us because you're a role model." ... Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden. Someone who writes fiction is not necessarily writing a depiction of any generalized group, they're writing a very specific story."

"Other Asian-American writers just shudder when they are compared to me; it really denigrates the uniqueness of their own work. I find it happening less here partly because people are more aware now of the flaws of political correctness — that literature has to do something to educate people. I don't see myself, for example, writing about cultural dichotomies, but about human connections. All of us go through angst and identity crises. And even when you write in a specific context, you still tap into that subtext of emotions that we all feel about love and hope, and mothers and obligations and responsibilities."

"One relative felt that the story of my grandmother should not have been revealed. My grandmother was the woman (in The Kitchen God's Wife) who had been raped, forced to be a concubine, and finally killed herself. My mother, though, got equally angry at the relative and said, "For so many years, I carried this shame on my back, and my mother suffered, because she couldn't say anything to anybody." And she said, "It's not too late; tell the world, tell the world what happened to her." And I take her mandate to be the one that is in my heart, the one that I should follow."

"I've long thought about how life is influenced by death, how it influences what you believe in and what you look for. Yes, I think I was pushed in a way to write this book by certain spirits — the yin people — in my life. They've always been there, I wouldn't say to help, but to kick me in the ass to write. ...Yin people is the term Kwan uses, because "ghosts" is politically incorrect. People have such terrible assumptions about ghosts — you know, phantoms that haunt you, that make you scared, that turn the house upside down. Yin people are not in our living presence but are around, and kind of guide you to insights. Like in Las Vegas when the bells go off, telling you you've hit the jackpot. Yin people ring the bells, saying, "Pay attention." And you say, "Oh, I see now." Yet I'm a fairly skeptical person. I'm educated, I'm reasonably sane, and I know that this subject is fodder for ridicule. ... To write the book, I had to put that aside. As with any book. I go through the anxiety, "What will people think of me for writing something like this?" But ultimately, I have to write what I have to write about, including the question of life continuing beyond our ordinary senses."

"People look at me as this very, I don't know, Confucius-like wise person — which I'm not. They don't see all the shit that I've been through."

"Reading for me was a refuge. I could escape from everything that was miserable in my life and I could be anyone I wanted to be in a story, through a character. It was almost sinful how much I liked it. That's how I felt about it. If my parents knew how much I loved it, I thought they would take it away from me. I think I was also blessed with a very wild imagination because I can remember, when I was at an age before I could read, that I could imagine things that weren't real and whatever my imagination saw is what I actually saw. Some people would say that was psychosis but I prefer to say it was the beginning of a writer's imagination. If I believed that insects had eyes and mouths and noses and could talk, that's what they did. If I thought I could see devils dancing out of the ground, that's what I saw. If I thought lightning had eyes and would follow me and strike me down, that's what would happen. And I think I needed an outlet for all that imagination, so I found it in books."

"External success has to do with people who may see me as a model, or an example, or a representative. As much as I may dislike or want to reject that responsibility, this is something that comes with public success. It's important to give others a sense of hope that it is possible and you can come from really different places in the world and find your own place in the world that's unique for yourself."

"(Q: Can you name some contemporary writers whose work you admire?) Erdrich: ...Amy Tan's novels The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife..."

"A further measure of the importance of the feminism of women of color was the tremendous efflorescence in their fiction. The writings of Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Amy Tan, and Louise Erdrich, among others, played a major role in bringing the feminist message and perspective to the masses of American women."

"I loved the early Amy Tan and her novel The Joy Luck Club."

"I was writing for businesses. I think my mother was a little skeptical in the beginning, but fortunately, as a free-lance writer I was successful almost immediately. And so she was very proud, because she measured success in terms of money, which is what I started to do as well. My goal then, became to increase the amount of money that I made each month. Not simply each year, but each month — I mean, talk about pressure — to have more billable hours each month. So that by the end of my third year of being a free-lance writer, I was billing 90 hours a week. I had no time to sleep. I had no life. People said I was crazy, that I was a workaholic. And I couldn't understand how it was that I had these wonderful clients, and I was making all this money, and I wasn't happy and I didn't feel successful. That's when I started to write fiction."

"Today, great writers from minority groups in the U.S. are finding their voice in the wonderful, rich imagery of magic realism. Writers such as Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Amy Tan all have a unique, rich way of writing that can be described as magic realism. These women are among those who have broken away from the style of writing that defines most of the fiction coming from industrialized countries: that pragmatic, minimalist style and way of facing reality in which the only things one dares talk about are those things one can control. What cannot be controlled is denied."

"My mother had a look on her face that I'll never forget. It was one of complete despair and horror, for losing Bing, for being so foolish as to think she could use faith to change fate."

"I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good."

"When I want something to happen — or not happen — I begin to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid. I found the opportunity."

"Only two kind of daughters. Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!"

"I had new thoughts, willful thoughts, or rather thoughts filled with lots of won'ts. I won't let her change me, I promised myself. I won't be what I'm not."

"I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control."

"For woman is yin, the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds."

"After the gold was removed from my body I felt lighter, more free. They say this is what happens if you lack metal. You begin to think as an independent person."