Brian D'Ambrosio Quotes

#1. Happiness is a habit,
it's more than fleeting,
more than a disintegrating lozenge.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#2. Boxing begins in illusion and ends in real blood and tears. That's what makes it so beautiful.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#3. Rum is tonic that clarifies the vision,
and sets things in true perspective.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#4. Manassa naught,
a padded white envelope
with no return address,
landlocked and antiseptic,
exploited like a gas station.
Beauty
passes through in the briefest of cameos.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#5. After you have seasoned your gloves with the blood, sweat and tears of your opponents, all else is anticlimactic.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#6. Force, not persuasion, not discussion, is the legitimate instrument for influencing and policing the hockey mind. Fighting in hockey is one of the most magnificent and eloquent displays of refinement in all of sports.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#7. Charisma is a word that erodes stale on the page. When compared with the tangible, flesh experience it tries to label, it falls short. The only way to understand it, is to meet it.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#8. Simplicity matters. Especially when it comes to the muscle memory of boxing. That is perhaps rule number one. Simplicity works. Simplicity is repetition. Repetition is function. Boil function down to one action, maybe two. Left or right. Simplicity. Simplicity is really the hardest thing.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#9. The lonely, wistful revisionism of memories is as gratingly repetitive as snow and ice in Canada. I avoid them both at all costs - memories and Canada.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#10. The stony silence of death,
trapped by the original gravity of our sins,
and the perpetuity of a long, leisurely yawn,
a world where blood and bone no longer matter.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#11. Pay phones,
relics of an almost-vanished landscape,
always a touch of seediness and sadness,
and a sense of transience,
sweaty phones used by men outside maternity wards,
feeding them fistfuls of change.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#12. To be a boxer is to be within yourself, inside your thoughts and feelings.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#13. Boxing is beautiful brutality, and the devil is in the duality. Boxing is a tug of war and you recognize the antithetical feelings that are pulling you from the other end.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#14. For a man to get married and stay married, he must detach from and disavow the three things that bind him to reality: sex, travel, and near-death experiences.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#15. Butterflies,
the embodiment of myth,
the articulation of the past,
first for the elite,
then for the rest of us.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#16. Boxing encompasses the very worst and very best of human nature and its beautiful brutality is a marvelous contradiction for a writer. It conjures up so many irreconcilably antagonistic feelings.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#17. I've always stressed the value of autonomy for intellectual and moral development. Autonomy provides us with a sphere of discretion which we all require.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#18. I never trust a man who tucks in his shirt by choice or neglects coffee in favor of tea.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#19. Endings are thus formally unappealing to me, more than beginning or ending, in life, I enjoy continuing. Continuing is my only focus or concern.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#20. On the perfect night there is nothing more transcendent or terrifying than boxing. It's the ultimate representation of the guilty pleasure.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#21. In these shallow arroyos
and grease-covered hills,
blowing dust zones,
the Christmas spirit of cotton bales,
fried in butter
and sweeping heat,
life,
spaciously allotted.
Catching our breath,
smiling in silence,
with the lowering sun in our faces.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#22. There is such a quiet desperation and chronic sense of dullness to Helena, Montana, which makes it the most socially grotesque and culturally bitter of any of the capital cities.

Brian D'Ambrosio

#23. Trying to change someone only makes them cling to their existing behavior with brutish, primal force.

Brian D'Ambrosio