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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“By the time we arrived the film had already started, and there was only standing room left behind the screen, where everything was in reverse and everyone was left-handed.”
― Dai Sijie, quote from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
“Cea mai gravă infracțiune a lui fusese să accepte lumea în care trăia ca pe una normală, rațională și corectă. Ca toți ceilalți, permisese publicității să îi multiplice dorințele; învățase să echivaleze fericirea cu posesiunile, iar prosperitatea cu banii cheltuiți la magazin.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
“A Strange Eastern Light “During the time of King Herod, Wise Men from the east came and asked, ‘Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.’” —Matthew 2:1”
― Seth Grahame-Smith, quote from Unholy Night
“Instead, power went to those who made things happen: businessmen and local magistrates. Over time, human nature being what it is, these men would create a kind of nobility, sometimes even buying titles from cash-poor foreigners, but this in itself underscores the point. Upward mobility was part of the Dutch character: if you worked hard and were smart, you rose in stature. Today that is a byword of a healthy society; in the seventeenth century it was weird.”
― Russell Shorto, quote from The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
“Humans had a genius for devising instruments of death. Their lives were so short and they seemed to value them so little, sending waves of men to clash in battlefields, then weighing victory by the piled corpses. And if they held their own lives so worthless, the lives of everything else were as fruit to pluck from trees.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Blackbringer
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