How can you think and hit at the same time?

Now, on the road to freedom, I was pausing for a moment near Temuco and could hear the voice of the water that had taught me to sing.

Pablo Neruda

The athlete of today is not an athlete alone. He's the center of a team - doctors, scientists, coaches, agents and so on.

Emil Zatopek

Not managing your time and making excuses are two bad habits. Don't put them both together by claiming you 'don't have the time'.

Bo Bennett

Presents, I often say, endear absents.

Charles Lamb

The message I take all round the world is Britain is open for business.

William Hague

I think I would cope like anyone copes with any tragedy. I'm sure I would be very upset for a while and then there would come a point where I would either have to stay in this place of darkness and anger, or I'd have to accept that it happened.

Jason Ritter

To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.

Leslie Fiedler

Back in the mid-1970s, we adopted some fairly ambitious goals to improve efficiency of our cars. What did we get? We got a tremendous boost in efficiency.

Jay Inslee

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last

Samuel Johnson

Man is occasionally what he should be perpetually.

Source Unknown

It would be a lowly art that allowed itself to be understood all at once.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It doesn't happen to me anymore, because a fresh generation of Africans and Asians has arisen to take over the business, but in my early years in Washington, D.C., I would often find myself in the back of a big beat-up old cab driven by an African-American veteran. I became used to the formalities of the : on some hot and drowsy Dixie-like afternoon I would flag down a flaking Chevy. Behind the wheel, leaning wa-aay back and relaxed, often with a cigar stub in the corner of his mouth (and, I am not making this up, but sometimes also with a genuine porkpie hat on the back of his head) would be a grizzled man with the waist of his pants somewhere up around his armpits. I would state my desired destination. In accordance with ancient cabdriver custom, he would say nothing inresponse but simply engage the stickshift on his steering wheel and begin to cruise in a leisurely fashion. There would be a pause. Then: 'You from England?' I would always try to say something along the lines of 'Well, I'm in no position to deny it.' This occasionally got me a grin; in any case, I always knew what was coming next. 'I was there once.' 'Were you in the service?' 'I sure was.' 'Did you get to Normandy?' 'Yes, sir.' But it wasn't Normandy or combat about which they wanted to reminisce. (With real combat veterans, by the way, it almost never is.) It was England itself. 'Man did it know how to rain and the warm beer. Nice people, though. Real nice.' I would never forget to say, as I got out and deliberately didn't overtip (that seeming a cheap thing to do), how much this effort on their part was remembered and appreciated.

Christopher Hitchens