Roger Kahn Quotes

Defeat, particularly dramatic defeat, confirms our worst impression of ourselves.

Being and writing, the road asked nothing more.

Unlike most, a ball player must confront two deaths. First, between the ages of thirty and forty he perishes as an athlete. Although he looks trim and feels vigorous and retains unusual coordination, the superlative reflexes, the major league reflexes, pass on. At a point when many of his classmates are newly confident and rising in other fields, he finds that he can no longer hit a very good fast ball or reach a grounder four strides to his right. At thirty-five he is is experiencing the truth of finality. As his major league career is ending, all things will end. However he sprang, he was always earthbound. Mortality embraces him. The golden age has passed in a moment. So will all things. So will all moments.

It was a time of transition, which few recognized, and glutting national satisfaction. Students and scholars were silent.

One did not go to Ebbets Field for sociology. Exciting baseball was the attraction, and a wonder of the sociological Brooklyn Dodgers was the excitement of their play.

No game is as verbal as baseball; baseball spreads twenty minutes of action across three hours of a day.

In the intimacy of Ebbets Field it was a short trip from the grandstand to the fantasy you were in the game.

The time seems simpler than today, but mostly because the past always seems simpler when its wars are done.

You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it.

That morning began with wind and hairy clouds. It was late March and the day rose brisk and uncertain, with gusts suggesting January and flashes of sun promising June. In every way, a season of change had come.

One can travel for weeks with baseball men and see no books at all.

The gracious mistress turned bitch in summer heat.

There is only so much space on the planet. Fathers perish to make room for sons.

Newspapers blew on dirty floors. Littering is an ancillary function of the free press.

One thing a writer has, if he is fortunate, and I have been fortunate, is a partnership with the years.