Priya

“His smile was so soft and fine:
like gleaming old ivory,
like homesickness, like a Christmas snowfall
in the dark village, like turquoise
around which many pearls are fashioned,
like moonlight
on a favorite book.

-in Mädchenmelancholie (Girls' melancholy)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man.”
― David Foster Wallace, String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis

“You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Arms and the Man

“The first duty for a man is still that of subduing Fear. We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at all till then. A man's acts are slavish, not true but specious; his very thoughts are false, he thinks too as a slave and coward till he have got Fear under his feet. Odin's creed, if we disentangle the real kernel of it, is true to this hour. A man shall and must be valiant; he must march forward and quit himself like a man - trusting imperturbably in the appointment and choice of the upper Powers; and on the whole not fear at all. Now and always, the completeness of his victory over Fear will determine how much of a man he is.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History