Roger Angell quotes
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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 AngellSource : FaceBook post by Roger Angell from May 10, 2017
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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 AngellSource : Roger Angell (2004). “The Summer Game”, p.214, U of Nebraska Press
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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 AngellSource : Roger Angell (1991). “Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader”, Ivan R Dee
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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 AngellSource : Roger Angell (2013). “Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion”, p.5, Open Road Media
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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 AngellSource : Roger Angell (2013). “Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion”, p.5, Open Road Media
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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 -
“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 AngellSource : "This Old Man" by Roger Angell, www.newyorker.com. February 17, 2014.
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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 -
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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 AngellSource : Roger Angell (2013). “The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket”, p.1294, Open Road Media
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“Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time.”
-- Roger AngellSource : Roger Angell (2015). “This Old Man: All in Pieces”, p.18, Anchor
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“Baseball’s absolute unpredictability makes amateurs of us all.”
-- Roger AngellSource : "Almost Over" by Roger Angell, www.newyorker.com. October 29, 2014.
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“The best defense against partisanship is expertise.”
-- Roger AngellSource : "An Interview With Roger Angell: 'They Look Easy, But They're Hard'". Interview with Jared Haynes, thestacks.deadspin.com. 1992.
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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 AngellSource : Roger Angell (2007). “Let Me Finish”, p.2, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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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 AngellSource : "Over the Wall" by Roger Angell, www.newyorker.com. November 19, 2012.
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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 -
“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 -
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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 -
“The great thing about catchers is that they do a lot of different things, and they're basically overlooked.”
-- Roger Angell -
“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 -
“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 -
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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 AngellSource : Roger Angell (2015). “This Old Man: All in Pieces”, p.20, Anchor
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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 -
“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 AngellSource : Roger Angell (2007). “Let Me Finish”, p.1, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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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 -
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“Everyone knows the best volume of the encyclopedia is the one with ships-S.”
-- Roger Angell
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