Roger Kahn Quotes

It was a fine thing to be a newspaperman and I very much wanted to be a good one.

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

At a point of life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams.

Nouns and verbs carry writing.

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.

I never heard a thrown ball make that sound before. The ball seemed to accelerate as it came close; an accelerating, impossibly fast pitch that made the noises of hornets and snakes.

The gracious mistress turned bitch in summer heat.

Baseball skill relates inversely to age. The older a man gets, the better a ball player he was when young, according to the watery eye of memory.

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

When the wind blew from the south and the French doors had been opened, the sound of cheering carried from Ebbets Field into the apartment. It was astonishing, to hear cheers from a major league crowd while sitting at home.

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.

I wonder if anyone always knows-you, me, Jackie Robinson, even Robert Frost-that we will cross to Safety. Or is it rather that when we are There, we think we always knew?

The immeasurable difference between producing cars and producing newspapers is pursuit of the horizon.

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