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[Golfers] are a special kind of moral realist who nips the normal romantic and idealistic yearnings in the bud by proving once or twice a week that life is unconquerable but endurable.

Alistair Cooke

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Alistair Cooke
Age: 95 †
Born: 1908
Born: November 20
Died: 2004
Died: March 30
Journalist
Radio Personality
Television Presenter
Writer
Salford
Greater Manchester
Golf
Idealistic
Prove
Bud
Normal
Proving
Week
Realist
Special
Golfers
Nips
Moral
Yearning
Endurable
Kind
Twice
Yearnings
Life
Romantic
Unconquerable

More quotes by Alistair Cooke

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Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.
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The best compliment to a child or a friend is the feeling you give him that he has been set free to make his own inquiries, to come to conclusions that are right for him, whether or not they coincide with your own.
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But afterall it's not the winning that matters, is it? Or is it? It'sto coinawordtheamenitiesthatcount: thesmell of the dandelions, the puff of the pipe, the click of the bat, the rain on the neck, the chill down the spine, the slow, exquisite coming on of sunset and dinner and rheumatism.
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It used to be said that you had to know what was happening in America because it gave us a glimpse of our future. Today, the rest of America, and after that Europe, had better heed what happens in California, for it already reveals the type of civilisation that is in store for all of us.
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Las Vegas is Everymans cut-rate Babylon. Not far away there is, or was, a roadside lunch counter and over it a sign proclaiming in three words that a Roman emperors orgy is now a democratic institution. 'Topless Pizza Lunch'.
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Canned music is like audible wallpaper.
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I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.
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It has always been cited as an irrepressible symptom of America's vitality that her people, in fair times and foul, believe in themselves and their institutions.
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More than anything else, though, to anyone who would write about it, golf offers a four-hour drama in two acts, which becomes memorable even in the tape-recorded reminiscenses of old champs, and which - in the hands of someone like Herb Wind - can become a piece of war correspondence as artfully controlled as Alan Morehead's account of Gallipoli.
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If computers take over, it will serve us right.
Alistair Cooke
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It's an acting job - acting natural.
Alistair Cooke
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No myth dies harder, and none is more regularly debunked by the facts, than the one about international sports contributing to international friendship.
Alistair Cooke
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In golf, humiliations are the essence of the game.
Alistair Cooke
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Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.
Alistair Cooke
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These doomsday warriors look no more like soldiers than the soldiers of the Second World War looked like conquistadors. The more expert they become the more they look like lab assistants in small colleges
Alistair Cooke
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To get an elementary grasp of the game of golf, a human must learn, by endless practice, a continuous and subtle series of highly unnatural movements, involving about sixty-four muscles, that result in a seemingly natural swing, taking two seconds to begin and end.
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I talk to my typewriter and that is what I've been working on for 40 years-how to write for talking.
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It rose slowly like a gull sensing a reckless blue fish to close to the surface, and then it dived relentlessly for the green, kicked and stopped three feet short of the flag.
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The Masters is more like a vast Edwardian garden party than a golf tournament.
Alistair Cooke
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It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.
Alistair Cooke