62 Quotes by David Maraniss

Originally, John Kennedy was going to come speak, and then Lyndon Johnson. Because it was October of ’62, neither made it because of the Cuban missile crisis.

Oftentimes the child is the father of the man.

There never was a champion who, to himself, was a good loser. There is a vast difference between a good sport and a good loser.” In Blaik’s opinion the “purpose of the game is to win. To dilute the will to win is to destroy the purpose of the game.” In this, as in most matters, he was influenced by General MacArthur. He never forgot MacArthur’s words: “There is no substitute for victory.

I said that I’m only there to write the truth, I’m not going to cover anything up, but I’ll put everything in context and get as close to the truth of this person as I can.

Late on weekend nights, when Vince was at last free from athletics, he took Marie out to his favorite haunts with the Palaus and other friends. They often drove up Route 9W to Englewood Cliffs for a late meal at Leo’s and then some band music at the Rustic Cabin, where they fell into the habit of buying a beer and steak sandwich for a performer who came over to their table to chat after his closing set, a skinny young Italian crooner from Hoboken named Frank Sinatra.

And then the industry itself was so cocky about what they were doing that they weren’t seeing what was coming on the horizon with Japan and Germany and other places that were building smaller cars.

I want my books to last, to stand the test of time, and to do that I focus on the forces that shape the subject – the cultural and sociological geography – to capture them in a way that will explain them no matter what they are doing.

The time was ordinary, 24 seconds, but the victory was historic. From that crowded little red house in Clarksville, out of an extended family of twenty-two kids, from a childhood of illness and leg braces, out of a small historically black college that had no scholarships, from a country where she could be hailed as a heroine and yet denied lunch at a counter, Skeeter had become golden, sweeping the sprints in Rome.