Quotes by Roger Angell - Page 1

Those who live by the wall must die by the wall.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Dies
Live By
Wall
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The best defense against partisanship is expertise.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Defense
Expertise
Partisanship
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Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Hard
Writing
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Baseball’s absolute unpredictability makes amateurs of us all.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Absolutes
Baseball
Unpredictability
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Everyone knows the best volume of the encyclopedia is the one with ships-S.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Encyclopedia
Ships
Volume
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The great thing about catchers is that they do a lot of different things, and they're basically overlooked.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Catchers
Different
Different Things
Great Things
Overlooked
Great Thing
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I felt what I almost always feel when I am watching a ballgame: Just for those two or three hours, there is really no place I would rather be.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Baseball
Three
Two
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We are all writers and readers as well as communicators with the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves with the clear and almost perfect thought.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Almost Perfect
Book
Reading
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I've been lucky. I've met a lot of baseball people, and I've learned to value people who talk - people who talk well and in long sentences and even long paragraphs.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Baseball
Long
People
Sentences
Paragraphs
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Our stories about our own lives are a form of fiction, I began to see and become more insistent as we grow older, even as we try to make them come out in some other way.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Fiction
Stories
Trying
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Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Time
Baseball
Forever
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What really makes baseball so hard is it's retributive capacity for disaster if the smallest thing is done wrong, and the invisible presence of defeat that attends every game.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Sports
Baseball
Games
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I knew I wasn't a baseball writer. I was scared to death. I really was afraid to talk to players, and I didn't want to go into the press box because I thought I was faking it.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Baseball
Player
Scared
Want
Box
Faking
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I think I wrote once that baseball in many ways is very much like reading. I said there are more bad books than bad ballgames, or maybe it was the other way around. I can't remember.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Baseball
Book
Reading
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Life is tough and brimming with loss, and the most we can do about it is to glimpse ourselves clear now and then, and find out what we feel about familiar scenes and recurring faces this time around.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Faces
Glimpse
Loss
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Baseball is slovenly and excessive in midsummer, with its onrolling daily cascade of line scores and box scores, shifting statistics, highlights and lowlights, dingers and shutouts, streaks and slumps.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Sports
Baseball
Slumps
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Infield practice is more mystic ritual than preparation, encouraging the big-leaguer, no less than the duffer in the stands, to believe in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that playing ball is a snap.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Sports
Believe
Practice
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I don’t read Scripture and cling to no life precepts, except perhaps to Walter Cronkite’s rules for old men, which he did not deliver over the air: Never trust a fart. Never pass up a drink. Never ignore an erection.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Men
Air
Scripture
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Once I could persuade these guys that all I wanted to hear from them was what they did - Tell me what you do - once you can persuade someone that this is all you're after, you can't shut them up because we're all fascinated by what we do.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Fascinated
Me Someone Because
Persuade
Shut
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I’m feeling great. Well, pretty great, unless I’ve forgotten to take a couple of Tylenols in the past four or five hours, in which case I’ve begun to feel some jagged little pains shooting down my left forearm and into the base of the thumb.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Couple
Pain
Past
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Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man's hand. Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose; it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance - thrown hard and with precision.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Baseball
Beautiful
Distance
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Cub fans, by consensus, are the best in baseball. Year after year, in good times and (mostly) bad, they turn out in vociferous numbers, sustaining themselves with a heavenly ichor that combines loyalty, criticism, cheerfulness, durability, rage, beer and hope, in exquisite proportions.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Loyalty
Baseball
Beer
Years
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Baseball's time is seamless and invisible, a bubble within which players move at exactly the same pace and rhythms as all their predecessors. This is the way the game was played in our youth and in our fathers' youth, and even back then ... there must have been the same feeling that time could be stopped.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Baseball
Father
Moving
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Hold a baseball in your hand ... Feel the ball, turn it over in your hand; hold it across the seam or the other way, with the seam just to the side of your middle finger. Speculation stirs. You want to get outdoors and throw this spare and sensual object to somebody or, at the very least, watch somebody else throw it. The game has begun.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Baseball
Games
Hands
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Friends of mine said later that they had been riveted by a postgame television close-up of Wade Boggs, sitting alone in the dugout with tears streaming down his face …. I suppose we should all try to find something better or worse to shed tears for than a game, no matter how hard it has been played, but perhaps it is not such a bad thing to see that men can cry at all.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Men
Games
Tears
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Losing is the bane and bugbear of every professional athlete's existence, but in baseball the monster seems to hang closer than in other sports, its chilly claws and foul breath palpable around the neck hairs of the infielder bending for his crosshand scoop or the reliever slipping his first two fingers off-center on the ball seams before delivering his two-and-two cut fastball.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Sports
Athlete
Baseball
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This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Half
Perfection
Yankees
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Sports are too much with us. Late and soon, sitting and watching - mostly watching on television - we lay waste our powers of identification and enthusiasm and, in time, attention as more and more closing rallies and crucial putts and late field goals and final playoffs and sudden deaths and world records and world championships unreel themselves ceaselessly before our half-lidded eyes.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Sports
Eye
Goal
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The press box at Wrigley Field in Chicago is an extended narrow shed, two rows deep, that is precariously bolted to the iron rafters just underneath the park's second deck. To gain access, one must climb a steeply angled ramp and clamber down a little starboard companionway, guarded at its foot by a uniformed minion and then proceed giddily along a catwalk that hangs directly above the tiered, circling rows of seats and spectators behind home plate.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Home
Feet
Two
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What the dead don't know piles up, though we don't notice it at first. They don't know how we're getting along without them, of course, dealing with the hours and days that now accrue so quickly, and, unless they divined this somehow in advance, they don't know that we don't want this inexorable onslaught of breakfasts and phone calls and going to the bank, all this stepping along, because we don't want anything extraneous to get in the way of what we feel about them or the ways we want to hold them in mind.
Roger Angell / Essayist
Breakfast
Mind
Phones
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Roger Angell Quotes - Page 1

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