Quotes from work

The Art of Racing in the Rain

“I suddenly realized. The zebra. It is not something outside of us. The zebra is something inside of us. Our fears. Our own self-destructive nature. The zebra is the worst part of us when we are face-to-face with our worst times. The demon is us!”

“We are all afforded our physical existence so we can learn about ourselves.”

“One more lap, Denny! One more lap!”

“Sometimes I believe… Sometimes I really do believe.”

“The race is long. It is better to drive within oneself and finish the race behind the other than it is to drive too hard and crash.”

“So what if man's body evolved from the monkeys? Whether he came from monkeys or fish is unimportant. The important idea is that when the body became "human" enough, the first human soul slipped into it.”

“The full moon rises. The fog clings to the lowest branches of the spruce trees. The man steps out of the darkest corner of the forest and finds himself transformed into…

A monkey?

I think not.”

“This is a rule of racing: No race has ever been won in the first corner; many have been lost there.”

“It makes one realize that the physicality if our world is a boundary to us only if our will is weak; a true champion can accomplish things that a normal person would think impossible.”

“The sun rises every day. What is to love? Lock the sun in a box. Force the sun to overcome adversity in order to rise. Then we will cheer! I will often admire beautiful sunrise, but I will never consider the sun a champion for having risen.”

“Somewhere, the zebra is dancing.”

“[T]he race is long - to finish first, first you must finish.”

“It’s so hard to communicate because there are so many moving parts. There’s presentation and there’s interpretation
and they’re so dependent on each other it makes things very difficult.”

“The true hero is flawed. The true test of a champion is not whether he can triumph, but whether he can overcome obstacles - preferably of his own making - in order to triumph.”

“My soul has learned what it came to learn, and all the other things are just things. We can't have everything we want. Sometimes, we simply have to believe.”

“People and their rituals. They cling to things so hard sometimes.”

“To separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we all encounter everyday. To say I am alive, I am wonderful, I am. I am. That is something to aspire to.”

“So much of language is unspoken. So much of language is compromised of looks and gestures and sounds that are not words. People are ignorant of the vast complexity of their own communication.”

“Any problems that may occur have ultimately been caused by you, because you are responsible for where you are and what you are doing there.”