“They should have learned to relax some, starting in training camp. It should be fun.”
Kenny Stabler Snake (specifically about the Houston Oilers and New Orleans Saints, who were tense because they felt they had to play extra hard not to lose, whereas his Oakland Raiders expected to win).
“Every man who has knocked about the world knows that the real peculiarity of Catholicism is that it may turn up anywhere in the most incongruous social types. We are not surprised if a billiard-marker or a music-hall acrobat is a Catholic, though we might be fairly surprised if he were a Baptist; we are not surprised if a scavenger or a ratcatcher is a Catholic, though we might be if he were a Theosophist.”
G.K. Chesterton in English Life Jan. 1924, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)
“He broke into song because he couldn’t find the key.”
#3 in “Gilbert!’s Top 10 More Bad Puns” in Gilbert! Magazine Vol. 6 #7 (June 2003)
“The chief error of these people is to be found in the very phrase to which they are most attached – ‘plain living and high thinking.’… They would be improved by high living and plain thinking. A little high living (I say, having a full sense of responsibility, a little high living) would teach them the force and meaning of the human festivities, of the banquet that has gone on from the beginning of the world.”
G.K. Chesterton Heretics
“The simple truth would still cause a considerable sensation. It is the one shock for which the world is still waiting.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness January 6, 1923, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2022)
“Quit while you’re behind.”
Another of mine, from August 6, 2004, inspired by entering the quotation that was published on August 1 2023.
“With his absolute faith in his own baseball eye, and his coaches’ ability to polish skills, [Earl] Weaver manages as though victory were an inevitability.”
Thomas Boswell How Life Imitates The World Series
Dolly “Parton writes songs, which is one artistic expression of storytelling — poetry adorned by the mathematics of music.... Preachers tell stories, too; stories about truths that change history. We preach the Word, and ‘in the beginning the Word and the Word was God.’ God is the first storyteller, and the angels the first song-tellers. A story endures to the extent that it conveys an enduring truth. That’s why so many songs are about love — desired, despairing, requited, unrequited, honoured, betrayed. Love is what most endures. The Jews taught the world about stories that make present now what God wrote in history, which is why their greatest collection of stories opens with ‘In the beginning.’ ‘Once upon a time’ is the usual way to do it, but doesn’t fit when time has not yet been created.”
Fr. Raymond J. de Souza in National Post December 24, 2022