J. R. Moehringer Quotes

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.

Any book is better than no book. Slowly, surely, one will lead you to another, which will lead you to the best.

Your best is whatever you can do comfortably without having a breakdown.

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.

A book is the only real escape from this fallen world. Aside from death.

To be a man, a boy must see a man

I began dividing life in absolutes... Things and people were either perfectly bad, or perfectly good, and when life didn't obey this black-and-white rule, when things or people were complex or contradictory, I pretended otherwise. I turned every defeat into a disaster, every success into an epic triumph, and separated all people into heroes or villains. Unable to bear ambiguity, I built a barricade of delusions against it.

Beer is amazing. Nutritional. Medicinal. A beverage, but also a meal.

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

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.

If only Ed Fleming had a mother who gave such sound advice. The manager of Wazoo's, a downtown Denver restaurant, Fleming is a CSU alum who has been darned giddy about the Rams' recent success. So giddy that he donned a necklace made of Pez candies, a red blazer - and nothing else. A few people gaped (some actually set aside their beers), but most ignored Fleming as he strutted like a red-blazered rooster, demanding that all hail the Mighty Naked Beer King.

The greatest players use anger as fuel. Michael Jordan played every night with something like road rage.

Some of football's gaudiest displays of manliness are purely aesthetic. It's not what players do, it's how they look doing it.

Of course many bars in Manhasset, like bars everywhere, were nasty places, full of pickled people marinating in regret.

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.

While I was busy hating Vegas, and hiding from Vegas, a funny thing happened. I grew to love Vegas.

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.

History is the narrative of people searching for a place to go.

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.