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Football is the most successful cult, in terms of members and profits, in human history. Oh wait, there's also religion.

Steve Almond

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Steve Almond
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: October 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
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Cult
Religion
Profit
History
Wait
Also
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Members
Humans
Football
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More quotes by Steve Almond

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Authors should be as involved with the marketing of their books as they want to be. No more, no less. I happen to recognized, quite early on, that no one was going to buy my book if I didn't do everything I could to let them know that the book existed.
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We are all, in the private kingdom of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. Someone who isn’t embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and all that we have to offer, in the end, is love.
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The truth is, every sport has been turned into a huge, nihilistic business.
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Part of what depresses me so much about football is that it's so clearly about exploiting people, most of them poor boys of color, because of what they can do to entertain us, not because we have any genuine concern for them as people.
Steve Almond
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Football offers us a sanitized spectacle of combat that has a clear resolution, which we need more and more today given our incoherent overseas wars.
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Just imagine what would happen if Obama grew a pair and in his last year in office just said, Forget it. Football is just too violent and too damaging to the economically vulnerable communities in this country. And it normalizes violence and fosters intolerance, etc. I mean: that would be awesome.
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You've got all these parents who are projecting their pathologies of fear onto their kids and those kids are understandably messed up. Tragedies happen and that you have to allow kids to experience their own fear and guilt and sorrow. It's the cover-up that really screws people over. Unfortunately, America specializes in cover-ups.
Steve Almond
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Obama said, basically, I wouldn't let any son of mine play football, though I do watch. And that struck me as remarkable! It's like he's saying, yeah, let some other set of parents or guardians put their boys up for that kind of punishment (and for my amusement). But not mine! It's just abject hypocrisy from a guy who should know better.
Steve Almond
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All language is an aspiration to music.
Steve Almond
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We need books...because we are all, in the private kingdoms of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend.
Steve Almond
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Every now and then, I'll run into someone who claims not to like chocolate, and while we live in a country where everyone has the right to eat what they want, I want to say for the record that I don't trust these people, that I think something is wrong with them, and that they're probably - and this must be said - total duds in bed.
Steve Almond
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I happen to love football so much and hate myself for loving it.
Steve Almond
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At about the age of ten, during a late summer visit to Sears to buy school clothes, I became aware of the concept of candy by the pound.
Steve Almond
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A good teacher, after all, wields the authority of a parent with none of the psychological baggage. The best of them are semi-mysterious figures whose wisdom seems boundless and whose approval helps us discover who we are.
Steve Almond
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Why are people so fascinated by how to eat Valomilks?’ She said, ‘Well, Dad, they’re round and they’re messy. But that’s what makes them fun. Once we get older we’re not supposed to be messy anymore. But for one moment when you’re eating a Valomilk, it’s okay to be messy again.
Steve Almond
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It is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken.
Steve Almond
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A lot of what I'm having to do to get myself weaned from football is really limit what media I allow myself to consume. And it's a big drag. But it's also the only way to kick the habit.
Steve Almond
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Football is Lotto for kids from economically vulnerable neighborhoods.
Steve Almond
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But something occurred to me as I sped through that dirty shroud of fog, something Vonnegut has been trying to explain to the rest of us for most of his life. And that is this: Despair is a form of hope. It is an acknowledgment of the distance between ourselves and our appointed happiness. At certain moments, it is reason enough to live.
Steve Almond
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Much as I love stories, I think I'll only be satisfied with myself as a writer if I'm able to produce a novel that feels publishable. The books that truly take me away - for weeks at a time - are all novels.
Steve Almond