Jackie Robinson

Life is not a spectator sport. If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re wasting your life.

This ain’t fun. But you watch me, I’ll get it done.

The most luxurious possession, the richest treasure anybody has, is his personal dignity.

During my life, I have had a few nightmares which happened to me while I was wide awake.

I’m grateful for all the breaks and honors and opportunities I’ve had, but I always believe I won’t have it made until the humblest black kid in the most remote backwoods of America has it made.

I don’t let my mouth say nothin’ my head can’t stand.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

A true friend freely, advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly, takes all patiently, defends courageously, and continues a friend unchangeably.

This comes of James teaching me to think for myself, and never to hold back out of fear of what other people may think of me. It works beautifully as long as I think the same things as he does.

Blows are sarcasm’s turned stupid.

Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

If we live truly, we shall see truly.

Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

Love truth, but pardon error.

Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people

It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious and severe. For as they seldom comprehend at once all the consequences of a position, or perceive the difficulties by which cooler and more experienced reasoners are restrained from confidence, they form their conclusions with great precipitance. Seeing nothing that can darken or embarrass the question, they expect to find their own opinion universally prevalent, and are inclined to impute uncertainty and hesitation to want of honesty, rather than of knowledge.

Strange – is it not? That of the myriads who Before us passed the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the road Which to discover we must travel too.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.