In the spacious highways of books major or minor, each poet is allowed the stride that will get him where he wants to go if,God help him, he can hit that stride and keep it.

-Sandburg, Carl
Quoted inTheComplete Poems of Carl Sandburg (1986),'Notes for a Preface'.

There is no reason why the infield should not try to put the batter off his stride at the critical moment, by neatly- timed disparagements of his wife's fidelity and his mother's respectability.

-Shaw, George Bernard
Alluding to baseball. Quoted in ColinJarman The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).