Sasha Chapin > Quotes

“My firm belief is that it's important to discover your own tremendous lack of potential. Life often contains the discovery that your place in humanity isn't quite what you thought it was. You find out that you weren't meant to be the lover of the thing you first loved. But it's not so bad. If you're lucky, you end up loving something else. When failure removes you from the wrong path, as wrenching as that feels, you want to be grateful. You're a little closer to where you should be. Even if you don't know where that is yet. Given the choice of any profession whatsoever, I would choose chess genius. I wasn't given that choice.”
― Sasha Chapin, All the Wrong Moves: A Memoir About Chess, Love, and Ruining Everything

“When did you realize you should stop playing? There was no one moment. Moments of realization are generally seductive lies concocted by unscrupulous memoirists. Typically, the process of epiphany is not instant—your mind doesn’t just crack open. You usually realize something long after you’ve suspected that it might be true, after it’s been lurking there for a long time, in the form of an uncomfortable thought that might have been droning in the background for weeks or years, like the purr of a detuned oboe. What we call “realization” is often the death of a self-serving rationale after it’s been strangled by reality for a long time.”
― Sasha Chapin, All the Wrong Moves: A Memoir About Chess, Love, and Ruining Everything