Mark Kurlansky Quotes
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When Ozzie Virgil became the first Dominican player in the majors, his nationality was barely noticed. What the press and fans talked about was his skin color. He was the first black player on the Detroit Tigers, and a great deal of attention was paid to him as someone who crossed the color line.
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Dominicans, Nicaraguans, and even the already highly skilled Cubans greatly improved their baseball skills when occupied by U.S. troops. The only acceptable resistance to a hated American presence was to try to beat them in baseball games.
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One of the truly horrible things about the Holocaust is that it doesn't end in 1945. It keeps affecting our lives in the way we think, and it will affect the way our children see the world.
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Salt is an unusual food product because it is almost universal - all human beings need salt, and most choose to eat more than is necessary.
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You could be a locavore in Florida or southern California. But I tried that. It was really limiting.
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The environmental movement does not always have to be about stopping things. It can be about fixing problems.
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The Negro League had some of the best players in history. Satchel Paige was probably one of the best pitchers in the history of baseball, and many believe catcher Josh Gibson was a better hitter than Babe Ruth.
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Cheap fish has usually been caught in careless ways.
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Baseball players are not specialists; they all have to do it all. That is why I, and many aficionados, dislike the American League's practice of replacing the pitcher with a designated hitter. This creates two players who do not have to do it all.
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People are always asking me what my favorite food is. I say, 'Food that tells me where I am.'
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I'd done occasional short stories, but I don't like publishing them in literary magazines; they treat you too much like college boys.
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I have an increasingly strong feeling that all of us, myself included, too many times make too many statements and don't ask enough questions.
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Working in a sugar mill is absolute misery for very little money.
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Violence does not resolve. It always leads to more violence.
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Everyone always gets a little irritated by imitators, but mostly I'm flattered. What if you never did anything anyone wanted to copy?
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People have a lot of strange relationships with food. There's a lot more going on there than just, 'Oh, these crullers remind me of my childhood.' We have a darker and more complex relationship to food.
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Storytelling is really at the root of everything that I do.
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What people eat is not well documented. Food writers prefer to focus on fashionable, expensive restaurants whose creative dishes reflect little of what most people are eating.
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I have lost count of how many wars I have actively and largely ineffectively tried to stop.
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I wanted college to be a real American adventure for me.
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I'm interested in most everything.
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Havana, for all its smells, sweat, crumbling walls, isolation, and difficult history, is the most romantic city in the world.
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In spite of muzzling the press, imprisoning thousands, and engaging in torture, kidnapping and murder, the Socialist government was still vulnerable to the accusation of being 'soft on Basques.'
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I am first and foremost a storyteller; I want to tell a good story, and I want it to mean something - something that I think is important.