Player Quotes (page 14)
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After supper was over and the toasts had been drunk, the boy Pablo was called in to play for the company while the gentlemen smoked. . . there was softness and languor in the wire strings--but there was also a kind of madness; the recklessness, the call of wild countries which all these men had felt or followed in one way or another. Through clouds of cigar smoke, the scout and the soldiers, the Mexican rancheros and the priests, sat silently watching the bent head and crouching shoulders of...
Willa Cather
For almost a generation, psychologists around the world have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that most of us would consider to have been settled years ago. The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes. Not every hockey player born in January ends up playing at the professional level. Only some do? the innately talented ones. Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists...
Malcolm Gladwell
Sometimes parents don't find what they're looking for it their child, so they plant seeds for what they'd like to grow there instead. I've witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son out to skate before he can even walk. Or in the mother who gave up her ballet dreams when she married, but now scrapes her daughter's hair into a bun and watched from the wings of the stage. We are not, as you'd expect, orchestrating their lives; we are not even trying for a second chance. We...
Jodi Picoult
I have graded my separate works from A to D. The grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself. Thus can I give myself an A-plus for Cat’s Crade, while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare. The report card is chronological, so you can plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like:
Player Piano B
The Sirens of Titan A
Mother Night A
Cat’s Cradle A-plus
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A
Slaughterhouse-Five...
Kurt Vonnegut
I’m stuck babysitting turtle eggs while a volleyball player slash grease monkey slash aquarium volunteer tries to hit on me.”
I’m not hitting on you,” he protested.
No?”
Believe me, you’d know if I was hitting on you. You wouldn’t be able to stop yourself from succumbing to my charms.
Nicholas Sparks
A good player who loses at chess is genuinely convinced hat he has lost because of a mistake, and he looks for this mistake in the beginning of his game, but forgets that there were also mistakes at ever step in the course of the game, that none of his moves was perfect. The mistake he pays attention to is conspicuous only because his opponent took advantage of it.
Leo Tolstoy
Last night as your breathingsettled into sleepwhat I heard was the half-forgotten sound, the velvet rush and hiss, the automatic clickas the record player's arm runs out, is brushed awayat the record's centre, the pulse of its subsidingoddly comforting.33 1/3 rpm. The knowledge that when the music ends, there will not be silence.
John Knowles