Roger Angell Quotes

22 quotes in 542 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• Sports are too much with us. Late and soon, sitting and watching - mostly watching on television - we lay waste our powers of identification…
• 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.…
• 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,…
• 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…
• The great thing about catchers is that they do a lot of different things, and they're basically overlooked.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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…
• Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time.
• The best defense against partisanship is expertise.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…

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