Quotes About Spectatorship

I can't imagine painting my face in a team colour and roaring with delight as a multi-millionaire kicks a ball at a net.

American football] fanbase resemble that of contemporary boxing: rich people watching poor people play a game they would never play themselves.

The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate. Let Big Brother do the singing and dancing for you. Be a reporter. Be a good witness. A grateful member of the audience.

An author's fondest dream is to turn the reader into a spectator; is this ever attained?

It is otherwise with sports and the media. There, too, a shift has occurred, from active participation to the vicarious participation of spectatorship. Four people used to go bowling, but 100 million watch the Super Bowl. Football, where men try to hit and hurt, has replaced baseball as the national game. It is as if the demotion from participant to spectatorship and from live spectatorship to TV spectatorship has to be compensated by upping the ante in violence.

When you go to watch a baseball game, when you go to watch an NBA game, when you watch an NFL game, when you go to watch movies, the offering that those arenas are doing foodwise is 'all the hot dogs you can eat'; all the French fries you can eat; for $20 you can eat 20 hot dogs.

The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live—undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands.

Tess and Felicity sat on the sidelines of life smirking at the players.

To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.

Mary watched everything as a mere spectator.

Crested Butte is for spectators; Chamonix is for participants.

Boxing is a lot of white men watching two black men beat each other up.

They come to see; they come that they themselves may be seen.