Annie Proulx quote: “The editorial page played streams of invective across the provincial political scene like a fire hose. Harangues, pitte…”

“Guys like Larry Bird -- he played so hard, he wants everybody else to play hard. That's not unreasonable. Any coach would want that and demand that.”

Larry Bird (1956) basketball player and coach

Magic Johnson — reported in David Steele (May 9, 1997) "Magic Says Bird Will Succeed", San Francisco Chronicle, p. B8.
About

“Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.”

Jerome David Salinger book The Catcher in the Rye

Mr. Spencer
Source: The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Chapter 2

“The literature of former days is like watching a fire from across the water; in present-day literature, the author himself is being scorched by the fire and he is bound to feel it deeply, and when he begins to feel it deeply, he is bound to take part in the social struggle.”

Lu Xun (1881–1936) Chinese novelist and essayist

35
"The Epigrams of Lusin"

“What do we mean by “understanding” something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Even if we knew every rule, however, we might not be able to understand why a particular move is made in the game, merely because it is too complicated and our minds are limited. If you play chess you must know that it is easy to learn all the rules, and yet it is often very hard to select the best move or to understand why a player moves as he does. So it is in nature, only much more so.
volume I; lecture 2, "Basic Physics"; section 2-1, "Introduction"; p. 2-1
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)