It's about learning your craft. That's a wonderful thing--especially with today's consumerism and instant gratification. You can't... buy that. It's about making decisions, corrections, choices. I don't think it's so much about becoming a tennis player. It's about becoming a person.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So little are the Homeric heroes presented as developing or having developed, that most of them--Nestor, Agamemnon, Achilles--appe...ar to be of an age fixed from the very first. Even Odysseus, in whose case the long lapse of time and the many events which occurred offer so much opportunity for biographical development, shows almost nothing of it. Odysseus on his return is exactly the same as he was when he left Ithaca two decades earlier. But what a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing by a wild beast!--between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord's jealousy, and the king, surrounded by violent intrigues, whom Abishag the Shunnamite warmed in his bed, and he knew her not! The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only in the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality; and it is this history of a personality which the Old Testament presents to us as the formation undergone by those whom God has chosen as his examples.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lov...er swooning under his lady's window.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of life's primal situations; the game of hide and seek. Oh, the delicious thrill of hiding while the others come looking for y...ou, the delicious terror of being discovered, but what panic when, after a long search, the others abandon you! You mustn't hide too well. You mustn't be too good at the game. The player must never be bigger than the game itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My first big mistake was made when, in a moment of weakness, I consented to learn the game; for a man who can frankly say "I do no...t play bridge" is allowed to go over in the corner and run the pianola by himself, while the poor neophyte, no matter how much he may protest that he isn't "at all a good player, in fact I'm perfectly rotten," is never believed, but dragged into a game where it is discovered, too late, that he spoke the truth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Insurance. An ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beat...ing the man who keeps the table.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threaten...ed with termination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If women were umpiring none of this [rowdyism] would happen. Do you suppose any ball player in the country would step up to a good...-looking girl and say to her, "You color- blind, pickle-brained, cross-eyed idiot, if you don't stop throwing the soup into me I'll distribute your features all over you countenance!" Of course he wouldn't.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud stains f...rom any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »