Laura Hillenbrand · 457 pages
Rating: (122.8K votes)
“His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“...maybe it was better to break a man's leg than to break his heart.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“It's easy to talk to a horse if you understand his language. Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die. They are only changed by the way people treat them.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“He had no money and no home; he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books....The books were the closest thing he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“... character reigns preeminent in determining potential.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“In 1938... the year's #1 newsmaker was not FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. Nor was it Lou Gehrig or Clark Gable. The subject of the most newspaper column inches in 1938 wasn't even a person. It was an undersized, crooked-legged racehorse named Seabiscuit.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“He (Thomas Smith) believed with complete conviction that no animal was permanently ruined. Every horse could be improved. He lived by a single maxim: 'Learn your horse. Each one is an individual, and once you penetrate his mind and heart, you can often work wonders with an otherwise intractable beast.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“The racehorse, by virtue of his awesome physical gifts, freed the jockey from himself. When a horse and a jockey flew over the track together, there were moments in which the man's mind wedded itself to the animal's body to form something greater than the sum of both parts.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“We had to rebuild him, both mentally and physically, but you don't have to rebuild the heart when it's already there, big as all outdoors.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“Old Pops and I have got four good legs between us,” he said. “Maybe that’s enough.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die. . . . They are only changed by the way people treat them.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“There's more than one thing I can't do and there are a lot more things than that that you can't do or you wouldn't be in the newspaper business. You'd be a jockey and a scholar and a connoisseur of femininity like I am”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“A Thoroughbred racehorse is one of God's most impressive engines. Tipping the scales at up to 1,450 pounds, he can sustain speeds of forty miles per hour. Equipped with reflexes much faster than those of the most quick-wired man, he swoops over as much as twenty-eight feet of earth in a single stride, and corners on a dime. His body is a paradox of mass and lightness, crafted to slip through air with the ease of an arrow. His mind is impressed with a single command: run. He pursues speed with superlative courage, pushing beyond defeat, beyond exhaustion, sometimes beyond the structural limits of bone and sinew. In flight, he is nature's ultimate wedding of form and purpose.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“Man is preoccupied with freedom yet laden with handicaps. The breadth of his activity and experience is narrowed by the limitations of his relatively weak, sluggish body. The racehorse, by virtue of his awesome physical gifts, freed the jockey from himself.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“We figure he is the people’s horse, and we propose to train him in the open.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“He had a colorless translucence about him that made him seem as if he were in the earliest stages of progressive invisibility.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“Who hit you in the butt with a saddle and told you you could ride?" a starter hissed before a race. "The same S.O.B. that hit you in the butt and told you you could start!" he shot back. Pollard had found the one place on earth that could hold his interest. He was broke, hungry, and, according to his sister Edie, "happy as heck.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“Howard then made Seabiscuit’s entry for the Santa Anita Handicap. He left the jockey space blank.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“The autos alone remained to conquer space.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“So long, Charley.”24 He had coined a phrase that jockeys would use for decades.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“Each of his workouts was attended by ten thousand or more spectators.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
“alive.3 Johnny found myriad avenues of”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend
Laura Hillenbrand
Born place: in Fairfax, Virginia, The United States
Born date May 15, 1967
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“this is the it you've been looking for”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Jazz
“I want him to live,” he says.
I watch,
helpless,
as the pain slips out.
Tears fall
when he whispers,
“But damn it, I want to live, too.”
― Lisa Schroeder, quote from The Day Before
“So, Augustus was Lord of Life? That means whenever that carol is sung, people are actually singing praises to Augustus!”
― Kenneth Atchity, quote from The Messiah Matrix
“If anyone is going to see the gospel as true and good, satanic blindness and natural deadness must be overcome by the power of God. This is why the Bible says that even though the gospel foolishness to many, yet 'to those who are called...Christ [is] the power of God and the wisdom of God' (1 Corinthians 1:24). The 'calling' is the merciful act of God to remove natural deadness and satanic blindness, so that we see Christ as true and good. The merciful act is itself a blood-bought gift of Christ. Look to him, and pray that God would enable you to see and embrace the gospel of Christ.”
― John Piper, quote from The Passion of Jesus Christ
“If others neither have goods we want nor can perform services we need, we make sure that they are at a safe distance and close ourselves off from them so that their emaciated and tortured bodies can make no inordinate claims on us.”
― Miroslav Volf, quote from Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation
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