Alistair Cooke Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• Like a christening, a wedding, a graduation ceremony, a holy war, a revolutioneven?a fireworksdisplay, agaudy promise of what life ought to be, not life itself.

  Alistair Cooke

  War, Promise, Holy

  1979 Of elections. The Americans.

  7 Copy quote

• I hasten to say to snobs from the Surrey pine-and-sand country that no invention since the corn plaster or the electric toothbrush has brought greater balm to the extremities of the senior golfer than the golfmobile, a word that will have to do for want of a better.

  Alistair Cooke

  Senior, Country, Golf

  Alistair Cooke (1996). “Fun and Games with Alistair Cooke: On Sport and Other Amusements”, p.80, Arcade Publishing

  5 Copy quote

• Washington's birthday is as close to a secular Christmas as any Christian country dare come this side of blasphemy.

  Alistair Cooke

  Christmas, Christian, Country

  Alistair Cooke (2007). “Letter from America, 1946-2004”, p.131, Knopf

  9 Copy quote

• Authors are now marketed like promising movie starlets and must rattle around the nation's television stations to try to assert a salable identity different from that of the other starlets.

  Alistair Cooke

  Trying, Identity, Different

  Alistair Cooke (2014). “America Observed: From the 1940s to the 1980s”, p.179, Open Road Media

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  War, College, Soldier

  53 Copy quote

• For many years I had an impression of my golf swing, which was that I vividly resembled Tom Weiskopf in the takeaway and Dave Marr on the downswing. Unfortunately, there came a day when I was invited to have my golf swing filmed via a video camera. Something I will never do again. When it was played back, what I saw - what you would have seen - was not Weiskopf and Marr but a man simultaneously climbing into a sweater and falling out of a tree.

  Alistair Cooke

  Fall, Golf, Men

  Alistair Cooke (1996). “Fun and Games with Alistair Cooke: On Sport and Other Amusements”, p.146, Arcade Publishing

  5 Copy quote

• Sir Guy Campbell's classic account of the formation of the links, beginning with Genesis and moving step by step to the thrilling arrival of 'tilth' on the fingers of coastal land, suggests that such notable features of our planet as dinosaurs, the prairies, the Himalayas, the seagull, the female of the species herself, were accidental by-products of the Almighty's preoccupation with the creation of the Old Course at St. Andrews.

  Alistair Cooke

  Moving, Golf, Land

  Alistair Cooke (1996). “Fun and Games with Alistair Cooke: On Sport and Other Amusements”, p.114, Arcade Publishing

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alistair Cooke

  War, Drama, Memorable

  Alistair Cooke (2015). “Fun & Games with Alistair Cooke: On Sport and Other Amusements”, p.101, Open Road Media

  5 Copy quote

• When that happens [the demise of golf], old men will furtively beckon to their sons and, like fugitives from the guillotine recalling the elegant orgies at the court of Louis XV, will recite the glories of Portmarnock and Merion, of the Road Hole at St. Andrews, the sixth at Seminole, the eighteenth at Pebble Beach. They will take out this volume from its secret hiding place and they will say: "There is no question, son, that these were unholy places in an evil age. Unfortunately, I had a whale of a time."

  Alistair Cooke

  Beach, Son, Golf

  4 Copy quote

• I have an insane desire to shave a stroke or two off my handicap.

  Alistair Cooke

  Golf, Two, Insane

  7 Copy quote

• [In 1889] the last big tract of Indian land was declared open for settlement, in Oklahoma. The claimants and the speculators mounted their horses and lined up like trotters waiting for a starting gun. The itchy ones jumped the gun and were ever after known as Sooners-and Oklahoma was thereafter called the Sooner State.

  Alistair Cooke

  Horse, Gun, Land

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alistair Cooke

  Golf, Blue, Feet

  Alistair Cooke (1996). “Fun and Games with Alistair Cooke: On Sport and Other Amusements”, p.82, Arcade Publishing

  4 Copy quote

• The emblem on the necktie reserved for the members of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews - The Vatican of golf - is of St. Andrew himself bearing the slatier cross on which, once he was captured at Patras, he was to be stretched before he was crucified.Only the Scots would have thought of celebrating a national game with the figure of a tortured saint.

  Alistair Cooke

  Golf, Games, Saint

  Alistair Cooke (1996). “Fun and Games with Alistair Cooke: On Sport and Other Amusements”, p.61, Arcade Publishing

  4 Copy quote

Page 3 of 3

First

← Prev

1

2

3

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin