Top 50 J.R. Moehringer Quotes
#1. Photographer shoots Sutton in close-up, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway behind his head. The expressway was built while Sutton was in prison. God what a monstrosity, Sutton says. I didn't think they could make Brooklyn uglier. I underestimated them.
J.R. Moehringer
#2. Boy did he hate banks. He told me once that the Founding Fathers worried more about banks than they worried about the British. They knew that banks had been causing chaos, bringing empires to their knees, for centuries, all in the name of free enterprise. Photographer
J.R. Moehringer
#3. While I fear that we're drawn to what abandons us, and to what seems most likely to abandon us, in the end I believe we're defined by what embraces us.
J.R. Moehringer
#4. Oh kid, it's all about confidence. That's the whole shebang right there. Whatever you do, do it with your nuts. That's how Ruth swung a bat-with his nuts. Court a girl, rob a bank, brush your teeth, do it with and from your God-given nuts or don't do it at all.
J.R. Moehringer
#5. Money. Love. There's not a problem that isn't caused by one or the other. And there's not a problem that can't be solved by one or the other.
J.R. Moehringer
#6. The greatest players use anger as fuel. Michael Jordan played every night with something like road rage.
J.R. Moehringer
#7. If you think Sigourney Weaver is
sexy then you are a homosexual.
J.R. Moehringer
#8. Bess and I had a talk. January 1919. Everything flowed from that talk, that moment. Everything. Look back on your life and see if you can pinpoint the moment when everything changed. If you can't? That means you haven't had your momemt yet, and you better hold on to your ass, it's coming.
J.R. Moehringer
#9. Yeah, says the Newsday reporter, he's a real pacifist. He's the Gandhi of Gangsters.
J.R. Moehringer
#10. Did you read where the great-grandson of Nathan Hale got married this weekend? Give me liberty or give me death. That's what the groom will be saying in about one month.
J.R. Moehringer
#11. The glint of devilment in his bright blue eyes, so blue that the FBI once described them in bulletins as azure. It's the rare bank robber who moves the FBI to such lyricism.
J.R. Moehringer
#12. Every book is a miracle,' Bill said. 'Every book represents a moment when someone sat quietly - and that quiet is part of the miracle, make no mistake - and tried to tell the rest of us a story.
J.R. Moehringer
#13. Food still isn't my thing, but I've learned to respect its power and significance.
J.R. Moehringer
#14. You think you choose the subjects of your books. But sometimes, in ways you don't know, the books choose you.
J.R. Moehringer
#15. While I was busy hating Vegas, and hiding from Vegas, a funny thing happened. I grew to love Vegas.
J.R. Moehringer
#16. Now look", my mother said. "When I feel myself starting to worry, I just tell myself, I will not worry about something that will never happen, and that always calms me, because most of the things we worry about will never happen. Why don't you give that a try?
J.R. Moehringer
#17. Now, whenever I need to go online, I confine myself to a tight circle: Gmail, MLB, NYTimes, Slate and maybe Facebook.
J.R. Moehringer
#18. Banks gamed the system, fucked society, caused the crash of 1929, drove the world into the abyss and paved the way for the rise of fascism - Stalin, Hitler - and they got despicably, disgustingly rich in the process. Banks. Banks did all that.
J.R. Moehringer
#19. In Zurich, in a cafe overlooking the Limmat, I ate butter-drenched white asparagus pulled from the ground that morning; it had the aftertaste of champagne. I've been able to appreciate epic meals in San Francisco, New Orleans, Berlin, Paris, Las Vegas.
J.R. Moehringer
#21. Like the Earth, the Web is a less appealing place than it used to be. If I want attitude and arguing and meanness and profanity and wrong information screamed at me as gospel, I'll get in a time machine and spend Christmas with my family in 1977.
J.R. Moehringer
#22. Vegas is like the old definition of writing: though I don't enjoy writing, I love having written. Though I didn't enjoy Vegas, I love having lived there.
J.R. Moehringer
#23. It cost me everything, absolutely everything, but maybe it's not love if it doesn't cost us everything.
J.R. Moehringer
#24. Your best is whatever you can do comfortably without having a breakdown.
J.R. Moehringer
#25. If you can live in Vegas, or visit Vegas, and leave in one piece, still loving it and somehow laughing about it, you should spend at least part of your last night in town doing something that will serve you well no matter where you go next: thank your lucky stars.
J.R. Moehringer
#26. Did you know Socrates said we love whatever we lack? Or think we lack? Socrates? If you feel stupid, you'll fall for someone brainy. If you feel ugly, you'll flip your lid for someone who's easy on the eyes.
J.R. Moehringer
#27. I'm a big fan of the poet Mary Jo Salter, and although she doesn't need to be discovered at all - she's widely admired and anthologized and extremely accomplished - I wish she were a household name.
J.R. Moehringer
#28. To simply hold a book, to imagine what it might say, would be a comfort.
J.R. Moehringer
#29. There's that old journalism rule that sunshine is the great disinfectant - which is how reporters bust their way into meetings and such all the time. In sports, I really think winning is the great disinfectant.
J.R. Moehringer
#30. I don't know. Sometimes I try to say what's on my mind and it comes out sounding like I ate a dictionary and I'm shitting pages. Sorry
J.R. Moehringer
#31. Some of football's gaudiest displays of manliness are purely aesthetic. It's not what players do, it's how they look doing it.
J.R. Moehringer
#32. My father was a food lover and a deadbeat dad, and maybe a connection between good food and bad dads was forged early, in the deepest folds of my subconscious, where we make so many decisions about our parents.
J.R. Moehringer
#33. History is the narrative of people searching for a place to go.
J.R. Moehringer
#34. In Manhasset you were either Yankees or Mets, rich or poor, sober or drunk ... You were 'Gaelic' or 'garlic, as one schoolmate told me, and I couldn't admit, to him or myself, that I had both Irish and Italian ancestors.
J.R. Moehringer
#35. Basketball's eras are defined by teams - Celtics, Lakers, Bulls - and baseball's epochs are defined by players - Ruth, Robinson, Mantle - but with football, it's the sideline strategists, the nutty professors and top coated Lears.
J.R. Moehringer
#36. Long before it legally served me, the bar saved me. It restored my faith when I was a boy, tended me as a teenager, and when I was a young man the bar embraced me.
J.R. Moehringer
#37. Baseball, boxing, handball - sooner or later every game gets compared to narrative, but only in football are the plays perfectly linear, drawn up with letters, and only in football is the field itself lined like a sheet of notebook paper.
J.R. Moehringer
#38. Of course many bars in Manhasset, like bars everywhere, were nasty places, full of pickled people marinating in regret.
J.R. Moehringer
#39. Truth has its place. In a courtroom, certainly. A boardroom? I don't know. I think truth is in the listener. Truth is something the listener bestows on a story
or not
J.R. Moehringer
#40. Any book is better than no book. Slowly, surely, one will lead you to another, which will lead you to the best.
J.R. Moehringer
#41. It takes just as many men to build a sturdy man, son, as it does to build a tower. You will look back on this time and remember remarkably little of it, excpt the extent to which I tried or did not try.
J.R. Moehringer
#42. Tacked above my desk are photos of artists I admire - Hopper, Sargent, Twain - and postcards from beloved bookstores where I've spent all my time and money - Tattered Cover, Elliot Bay, Harvard Bookstore.
J.R. Moehringer
#43. Life is complicated, love isn't. If you need to think about it for one half second, you're not in love.
J.R. Moehringer
#44. Write every day; never give up; it's supposed to be difficult; try to find some pleasure and reward in the act of writing, because you can't look for praise from editors, readers, or critics. In other words, tips that are much easier to give than to take.
J.R. Moehringer
#45. Hell freezing over?
I don't know. But the devil's definitely wearing a sweater.
J.R. Moehringer
#46. His current theory is that Sutton lived three separate lives. The one he remembered, the one he told people about, the one that really happened.
J.R. Moehringer
#48. As if I'd said I wanted to sell cheese sandwiches outside Grateful
Dead concerts ...
J.R. Moehringer
#49. A book is the only real escape from this fallen world. Aside from death.
J.R. Moehringer
#50. Beer is amazing. Nutritional. Medicinal. A beverage, but also a meal.
J.R. Moehringer
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