Famous quotes containing the words american, basketball and/or player:
“Do not be discouraged, if in a thousand instances you find your kindness rejected and wronged, your good evil-spoken of, and the hand you extend for the relief of others, cast insultingly away; the benevolence which cannot outlive these trials of its purity and strength, is not like the self-sacrifice of him, who went about doing good.”
—C., U.S. women’s magazine contributor. American Ladies Magazine, pp. 331-4 (July 1828)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)
“The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)