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
See more on GoodReads
“A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from The God Delusion
“I HIDE myself within my flower
That wearing on your breast,
You, unsuspecting, wear me too—
And angels know the rest.
I hide myself within my flower,
That, fading from your vase,
You, unsuspecting, feel for me
Almost a loneliness...”
― Emily Dickinson, quote from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
“It will come with a rush and a roar and a shudder. It will come howling and laughing and shrieking and moaning. It will come so fast you can’t help yourself you will stretch out your arms to embrace it. You will feel it before it comes and you will tense yourself for acceptance and the earth which is your eternal bed will tremble at the moment of your union.”
― Dalton Trumbo, quote from Johnny Got His Gun
“But even now I know this isn't a fairy tale. I know that we'll have hard times, confusing times. I know that things won't always happen the way we want them to and that we'll have to work to remember that we chose this. It won't be perfect, not all the time.
This isn't happily ever after.
It's so much more than that.”
― Kiera Cass, quote from The One
“Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel.' Sign in Skardu”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time
Aquarium
Priest
When We Collided
First World
QueenpinBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
