Roger Kahn

Roger Kahn (31 October 1927 – February 6, 2020) was an American author, best known for his writings on baseball and for his 1972 memoir, The Boys of Summer. A Sports Illustrated panel selected The Boys of Summer as the greatest of all baseball books.

Quotes

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.
- Lines On The Transpontine Madness, p. xi

In the intimacy of Ebbets Field it was a short trip from the grandstand to the fantasy you were in the game.
- Lines On The Transpontine Madness, p. xii

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.
- Lines On The Transpontine Madness, p. xii

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.
- Lines On The Transpontine Madness, p. xvii

He bore the burden of a pioneer and the weight made him strong. If one can be certain of anything in baseball, it is that we shall not look upon his like again.
- Lines On The Transpontine Madness, p. xix (See also: Jackie Robinson)

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.
- Lines On The Transpontine Madness, p. xx

One thing a writer has, if he is fortunate, and I have been fortunate, is a partnership with the years.
- Lines On The Transpontine Madness, p. xxi

Surely these fine athletes, those boys of summer, have found their measure of ruin.
- Lines On The Transpontine Madness, p. xxi

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.
- Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 3

It was a time of transition, which few recognized, and glutting national satisfaction. Students and scholars were silent.
- Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 6

One can travel for weeks with baseball men and see no books at all.
- Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 6

No game is as verbal as baseball; baseball spreads twenty minutes of action across three hours of a day.
- Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 9

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.
- Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 10

What did it matter, Babe Ruth or Jersey Joe Stripp? If vector analysis was beyond me, I could still watch a ball game.
- Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 19

In the dead sunlight of a forgotten spring the major leaguers were trim, graceful and effortless. They might have been gods for these seemed true Olympians to a boy who wanted to become a manand who sensed that it was an exalted manly thing to catch a ball with one hand thrust across your body and make a crowd leap to its feet and cheer.
- Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 19

The world is never again as it was before anyone you love has ever died; never so innocent, never so fixed, never so gentle, never so pliant to your will. But these are afterthoughts. Generations vie and the young recover swiftly, or believe they do.
- Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 30

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.
- Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 36

At carefree times in early boyhood I chose to believe that life was a kind of ball game, but with a mix of years and perception I learned better.
- Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 43

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.
- Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 55

The immeasurable difference between producing cars and producing newspapers is pursuit of the horizon.
- Chapter 2, Ceremonies of Innocence, p. 64

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?
- Chapter 2, Ceremonies of Innocence, p. 82

The gracious mistress turned bitch in summer heat.
- Chapter 2, Ceremonies of Innocence, p. 84

Defeat, particularly dramatic defeat, confirms our worst impression of ourselves.
- Chapter 2, Ceremonies of Innocence, p. 90

The time seems simpler than today, but mostly because the past always seems simpler when its wars are done.
- Chapter 2, Ceremonies of Innocence, p. 104

Being and writing, the road asked nothing more.
- Chapter 2, Ceremonies of Innocence, p. 125

It was a fine thing to be a newspaperman and I very much wanted to be a good one.
- Chapter 2, Ceremonies of Innocence, p. 175

There is only so much space on the planet. Fathers perish to make room for sons.
- Afterwords on the Life of Kings, p. 434

Newspapers blew on dirty floors. Littering is an ancillary function of the free press.
- Afterwords on the Life of Kings, p. 436

Is that the minds last, soundless, dying cry? Who will remember? There is no rustling of old crowds as my long, wrenching, joyous voyage ended, only the question, "Who will remember?"
- Afterwords on the Life of Kings, p. 438