Quotes from John Leonard

The rich are different from you and me because they have more credit.

Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.

Books fall from Garry Wills like leaves from a maple tree in a sort of permanent October.

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

The original Marx quote (rough) History repeats twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. The addition by Leonard; Technology repeats twice, the first time as farce, and the second as tragedy

The rich are different from you and me because they have more credit.

It takes a long time to grow an old friend.

Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus ?

In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.

Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.

Books are where we go alone to complicate ourselves. Inside this solitude, we take on contours, textures, perspectives. Heightened language levitates the reader. Great art transfigures. And when we go back to it, it's full of even more surprises. We get older; it gets smarter.

It seems to me that my whole life I've been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. And the first person I had to rescue was myself.

to discover that the moon has something on it and it seems to be intelligently controlled.  When we were in our infancy of development

For Pol Pot, as for every other kamikaze of Kingdom Come, "the goal was not to destroy but to transmute." We have heard this chiliastic tommyrot before, from a variety of faith-based ethnic cleansers forever seeking to transmute the rest of us to death.

To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms.

from investigating the German activity there.  The Germans had to be there for some classified reason.  What was that?  It stands to reason and starts to make sense that this trip by our government was of serious national security importance, and was absolutely handled that way.  With all the massive resources used, and

Everybody is forever saying that the essay is dead. This is always said in essays.

Aspiring to a souffle, he achieves a pancake at which the reader saws without much appetite.

In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.

It takes a long time to grow an old friend.

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?