Lapham’s Quarterly

A win always seems shallow: it is the loss that is so profound and suggests nasty infinities.

I do love cricket—it’s so very English.

Recreations should be as sauces to your meat, to sharpen your appetite unto the duties of your calling, and not to glut yourselves with them.

Football causeth fighting, brawling, contention, quarrel picking, murder, homicide and great effusion of bloode, as daily experience teacheth.

I never yet could make out why men are so fond of hunting; they often hurt themselves, often spoil good horses, and tear up the fields—and all for a hare or a fox or a stag that they could get more easily some other way.

If I lose at play, I blaspheme, and if my fellow loses, he blasphemes. So that God is always sure to be the loser.

Gambling is the child of avarice, the brother of iniquity, and the father of mischief.

The whole secret of fencing consists but in two things, to give and not to receive.

The sadness of the end of a career of an older athlete, with the betrayal of his body, is mirrored in the rest of us. Consciously or not, we know: there, soon, go I.

A brilliant boxing match, quicksilver in its motions, transpiring far more rapidly than the mind can absorb, can have the power that Emily Dickinson attributed to great poetry: you know it’s great when it takes the top of your head off.