Baseball is so modestly republican. The World Series is a continuation of the season by other means. Played in real towns, it is a...warded, democratically, to the city with the most wins, not the best caterers. And the players are built to human, yeoman scale. Footballers wear uniforms designed to make them mammoth and interchangeable, like the products of an oversized assembly line. Baseball outfits are meant to betray the real body underneath. In baseball's perfectly American balance of anarchy and order, uniforms are worn. But republican flannels, for God's sake, not the pads and helmets of a Nixonian Swiss guard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You don't want to be lousy during the World Series. If you've got to be lousy, let it be June. And believe me, I was very lousy ye...sterday. I had nothing to say, and, by God, I said it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sickness comes to us all, Mr. Dillon.... We never know when, we never know why, we never know how. The only blessed thing we know ...is it'll come at the most inconvenient, unexpected time. Just when you've got tickets to the World Series. And that's the way the permanent waves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the eighth, Hermanski smashed a drive to the scoreboard. Henrich backed against the board and leaped either four or fourteen fe...et into the air. He stayed aloft so long he looked like an empty uniform hanging in its locker. When he came down he had the ball.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustome...d to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case" in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The woman's world ... is shown as a series of limited spaces, with the woman struggling to get free of them. The struggle is what ...the film is about; what is struggled against is the limited space itself. Consequently, to make its point, the film has to deny itself and suggest it was the struggle that was wrong, not the space.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Depression moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we ...can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People who have realized that this is a dream imagine that it is easy to wake up, and are angry with those who continue sleeping, ...not considering that the whole world that environs them does not permit them to wake. Life proceeds as a series of optical illusions, artificial needs and imaginary sensations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Movies are a combination of art and mass medium, but television is so single in its purpose--selling--that it operates without tha...t painful, poignant mixture of aspiration and effort and compromise. We almost never think of calling a television show "beautiful," or even of complaining about the absence of beauty, because we take it for granted that television operates without beauty. When we see on the television photographic records of the past, like pictures of Scott's Antarctic expedition or those series on the First World War, they seem almost too strong for the box, too pure for it. The past has a terror and fascination and a beauty beyond almost anything else. We are looking at the dead, and they move and grin and wave at us; it's an almost unbearable experience. When our wonder or our grief are interrupted or followed by a commercial, we want to destroy the ugly box. Old movies don't tear us apart like that. They do something else, which we can take more of and take more easily; they give us a sense of the passage of life. Here is Elizabeth Taylor as a plump matron and here, an hour later, as an exquisite child.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I thought I never wanted to be a father. A child seemed to be a series of limitations and responsibilities that offered no reward.... But when I experienced the perfection of fatherhood, the rest of the world remade itself before my eyes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »