The Last Days of Roger Federer Quotes

“down memory lane with his old rival John McEnroe, who, alongside everything else—music, art, tennis commentary, and punditry—maintained a busy life reminiscing about his earlier life. Sometimes it seemed as if the lucrative business of reminiscing was not just a full-time job but a full-time life as McEnroe rehearsed the key moments and told and retold the old stories, in his autobiography, Serious, in numerous documentaries, in the course of his match commentary and punditry for TV (hopping profitably between the BBC and an American channel in the course of the same day),”
― Geoff Dyer, The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings

“Right after my own breakfast today—a not ignoble soft scramble—in the course of looking up something in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, I came across the titular patient’s notebook entries about winds: There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The alm, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened aref or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense. There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise. The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days—burying villages. Literature is not a packed nightclub operating a one-in, one-out door policy but I am conscious that a VIP like this (with the P standing for ‘passage’), while scoring well on a Beaufort scale of quality, no longer commands the easy admission to my affections that it once did. It’s been bounced to the margins of my tonal receptiveness by Eve Babitz, who knows the winds of Southern California ‘the way Eskimos know their”
― Geoff Dyer, The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings