The voices / 9 fragments

Roger Kahn

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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01Undated

You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You can't ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that it's important, that it's not typing; it's writing.

Roger Kahn / quote

02Undated

Why do we remember the Boys of Summer? We remember because we were young when they were, of course. But more, we remember because we feel the ache of guilt and regret. While they were running, jumping, leaping, we were slouched behind typewriters, smoking and drinking, pretending to some mystic communion with men we didn't really know or like. Men from ghettos we didn't dare visit, or rural farms we passed at sixty miles an hour. Loving what they did on the field, we could forget how superior we felt towards them the rest of the time. By cheering them on we proved we had nothing to do with the injustices that kept their lives separate from ours. There's nothing sordid or false about the Boys of Summer. Only our memories smell like sweaty jockstraps.

Roger Kahn / quote

03Undated

Pique or policy. We would never know.

Roger Kahn / quote

04Undated

I was showing early symptoms of becoming a professional baseball man. I was lying to the press.

Roger Kahn / quote

05Undated

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.

Roger Kahn / quote

06Undated

Football is violence and cold weather and college rye.

Roger Kahn / quote

07Undated

Boxing is smoky halls and kidneys battered until they bleed.

Roger Kahn / quote

08Undated

Football is violence and cold weather and sex and college rye.

Roger Kahn / quote

09Undated

Tennis and golf are best played, not watched.

Roger Kahn / quote