Joseph Bottum > Quotes

“It might stand as the surest marker of the difference between childhood and age: A month was once forever, and now it’s just a month. Or less. One”
― Joseph Bottum, Dakota Christmas

“It's hard to renounce heroes unless you have one to start with.”
― Joseph Bottum

“Besides, he was also a hell of a ballplayer. THE END”
― Joseph Bottum, The Swinger

“(Dune's Frank) Herbert made religion the inescapable instrument of cultural change.”
― Joseph Bottum

“I wish I trusted people more,” Jeter has said. “But when I meet someone, the first thing is, ‘What does this person want?’ And I put up a defense mechanism.” For that matter, he would add, “I’ve always been that way,” and his first seasons as a Yankee”
― Joseph Bottum, The Swinger

“The smile wasn’t there at the beginning. In a few of the early pictures, you can see a derisive smirk beginning to curl up on the right side of Jeter’s face, almost as though the young player had found a cocky persona and was trying it on for size. Still, he didn’t use the smirk for his first glossy publicity shots with the Yankees or the pictures on his rookie-year baseball cards. Not quite scowling—although his eyebrows angle down in a V that aims the viewer’s eye at the unsmiling center of his face—he looks … serious, I guess, in those early photographs. Unswerving. A young man with an almost childish openness about his furious drive and discipline. A young man who allowed the outward projection of his public ambitions to show on his face. By 1999,”
― Joseph Bottum, The Swinger

“The people at Occupy Wall Street were the return of the Levellers and Diggers, lifted straight out of the seventeenth century”
― Joseph Bottum, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America

“Jeter was “warmly cold,” Sherman added in a telling phrase. The truth is, we don’t know the man at all. Over the twenty years we’ve watched him, Derek Jeter has been willing to give us his professional performance on the baseball field. And off that field, he’s been willing to give us a learned, practiced smile. But it’s a smile designed mostly to keep us from seeing that there was one thing he wasn’t going to give us. He wasn’t going to give us himself.”
― Joseph Bottum, The Swinger

“We have a name for the sum of grievances and compromises, this sheer normality of life lived among other people. We call it civilization. Culture, society, the workaday interactions of ordinary time.”
― Joseph Bottum

“People who are easily embarrassed – those who blush too often and too soon – usually end up retreating from excellence.”
― Joseph Bottum

“A fierce hatred of embarrassment ruled a surprising amount of the life of Moses Malone, the Hall of Fame basketball center.”
― Joseph Bottum

“Cities on the ocean have a choice whether to turn their faces or their backs to the water, lining the shore either with pretty hotels and rich homes or dim warehouses, narrow streets, and greasy piers. All prairie towns turn away from the prairie, however. The huddled houses form a storm-battened island in the midst of endless space.”
― Joseph Bottum

“And then there were books, and more books, and yet more books — until everything we had wanted Christmas to be seemed present in the dead of those cold winters.”
― Joseph Bottum, Dakota Christmas

“Someone as locked down and in control as Jeter was probably not much tempted by gambling and recreational drugs. (His only admitted addiction is the nicely self-deprecating one of too much movie watching. “During the off-season, I go to the movies almost every day,” he’s told reporters. “You hear about women buying shoes? I buy DVDs. I definitely have a problem.”)”
― Joseph Bottum, The Swinger

“Anything that keeps old words in circulation is to be treasured, the French revolution be damned.”
― Joseph Bottum