Top Roger Angell Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Roger Angell Biography

Roger Angell (born September 19, 1920) is an American essayist known for his writing on sports, especially baseball. He has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker and was its chief fiction editor for many years. He has written numerous works of fiction, non-fiction, and criticism, and for many years wrote an annual Christmas poem for The New Yorker.

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Roger Angell Quotes

Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time.

Authors, Hard, Time, Writing

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.

Baseball, Long, Met, Paragraphs, People

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.

Baseball, Highlights, Onrolling, Slumps, Sports, Streaks

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.

Brimming, Faces, Glimpse, Life, Loss

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.

Baseball, Finger, Games, Hand, Hands, Seam

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.

Men, Games, Tears, Suppose, Television, Face

Baseball’s absolute unpredictability makes amateurs of us all

Baseball, Unpredictability, Absolutes, Absolute, Baseballs

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.

Book, Reading, Almost Perfect, Thought, Perfect, Please

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.

Ball, Believe, Playing, Practice, Spite, Sports

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.

Athlete, Baseball, Bending, Closer, Monster, Sports

Those who live by the wall must die by the wall.

Die, Dies, Live, Live By, Wall

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.

Baseball, Book, Reading, Maybe, Way, Books

Sports are too much with us. Late and soon, sitting and watching - mostly watching on television - we lay waste our powers of identification and enthusiasm and, in time, attention as more and more closing rallies and crucial putts and late field goals and final playoffs and sudden deaths and world records and world championships unreel themselves ceaselessly before our half-lidded eyes.

Eye, Goal, Sports, Television, Time, Unreel

Everyone knows the best volume of the encyclopedia is the one with ships-S.

Encyclopedia, Knows, Ships, Volume

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.

Baseball, Felt, Place, Three, Two

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.

Become, Come, Fiction, Older, Stories, Trying

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.

Baseball, Beer, Cheerfulness, Durability, Loyalty, Proportions

The press box at Wrigley Field in Chicago is an extended narrow shed, two rows deep, that is precariously bolted to the iron rafters just underneath the park's second deck. To gain access, one must climb a steeply angled ramp and clamber down a little starboard companionway, guarded at its foot by a uniformed minion and then proceed giddily along a catwalk that hangs directly above the tiered, circling rows of seats and spectators behind home plate.

Access, Home, Iron, Precariously, Ramp, Two

The best defense against partisanship is expertise.

Against, Defense, Expertise, Partisanship

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.

Air, Life, Men, Read, Scripture, Walter

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