Chessboard Quotes & Sayings

That she won the game startled me cold. The way she won, the pattern of her thought on the chessboard, charmed me warm again and then some. — Richard Bach

A Mystic And A Drunk

The Universe turns on an axis.
Let my soul circle around a table
like a beggar, like a planet
rolling in the vast, totally helpless and free.

The knight and the castle move jaggedly
about the chessboard, but they're actually
centered on the king. They circle.

If love is your center, a ring
gets put on your finger.

Something inside the moth
is made of fire.

A mystic touches the annihilating tip
of pure nothing.

A drunkard thinks peeing is absolution.
Lord, take these impurities from me.

The lord replies, First, understand
the nature of impurity. If your key is bent,
the lock will not open.

I fall silent.
King Shams has come.
Always when I close, he opens. — Jalaluddin Rumi

I started by just sitting by the chessboard exploring things. I didn't even have books at first, and I just played by myself. I learnt a lot from that, and I feel that it is a big reason why I now have a good intuitive understanding of chess. — Magnus Carlsen

Self-confidence is very important. If you don't think you can win, you will take cowardly decisions in the crucial moments, out of sheer respect for your opponent. You see the opportunity but also greater limitations than you should. I have always believed in what I do on the chessboard, even when I had no objective reason to. It is better to overestimate your prospects than underestimate them. — Magnus Carlsen

My world we humans we're just pawns on an immortal chessboard. — Karen Marie Moning

I never knew whether his speedy speech patterns reflected amphetamine use or an amphetamine mind. He would often lead me up blind alleys or through an endless labyrinth of incomprehensible logic. I felt like Alice with the Mad Hatter, negotiating jokes without punch lines, and having to retrace my steps on the chessboard floor back to the logic of my own peculiar universe. — Patti Smith

There are more adventures on a chessboard than on all the seas of the world — Pierre Mac Orlan

The moment is past. The chessboard has gone; and the people. You must let me take the room from you too. — Dorothy Dunnett

The only battles that he and his kin fought, the only blood they spilt was on the chessboard. Massacres and carnage were not to his taste. He preferred the long, slow, tortuous death. I — Kiran Nagarkar

In the center is Judge Theodore Sedgwick, the first of the Stockbridge Sedgwicks and a great-great-great-grandfather of Edie's and of mine, is buried under his tombstone, a high rising obelisk, and his wife Pamela is beside him. They are like the king and queen on a chessboard, and all around them like a pie are more modest stones, put in layers, back and round in a circle. The descendants of Judge Sedgwick, from generation unto generation, are all buried with their heads facing out and their feet pointing in toward their ancestor. The legend is that on Judgement Day when they arise and face the Judge, they will have to see no one but Sedgwicks. — Jean Stein

The Buke of Ye Chess used the game as the basis for a series of sermons on morality. Neither book illustrates play or player improvement, but uses the chessboard and pieces to 'allegorize a political community whose citizens contribute to the common good'2. — Laura Caine Ramsey

Migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity. They are children, women and men who leave or who are forced to leave their homes for various reasons, who share a legitimate desire for knowing and having, but above all for being more — Pope Francis

I shall sit down,' replied the cat, sitting down, 'but I shall enter an objection with regard to your last. My speeches in no way resemble verbal muck, as you have been pleased to put it in the presence of a lady, but rather a sequence of tightly packed syllogisms, the merit of which would be appreciated by such connoisseurs as Sextus Empiricus, Martianus Capella, and, for all I know, Aristotle himself.'
Your king is in check,' said Woland.
Very well, very well,' responded the cat, and he began studying the chessboard through his opera glasses.
And so, donna,' Woland addressed Margarita, 'I present to you my retinue. This one who is playing the fool is the cat Behemoth ... — Mikhail Bulgakov

He'd always had a quickening of the heart when he crossed into Arizona and beheld the cactus country. This was as the desert should be, this was the desert of the picture books, with the land unrolled to the farthest distant horizon hills, with saguaro standing sentinel in their strange chessboard pattern, towering supinely above the fans of ocotillo and brushy mesquite. — Dorothy B. Hughes

I guess it's hard, being apart all the time."
"It really is. If Lucas were still here, everything would be different."
Vic's smile turned smug. "Yeah, I'd have a roommate who could beat me at chess instead of the other way around."
Ranulf never looked up from the chessboard. "I hear your insults and plan to silence them with my victory."
"Keep dreaming," Vic called. — Claudia Gray

On the chessboard of his godforsaken existence, the pieces were lined up, the play preordained. Man, so many times in life you didn't get to pick your path because the way you went was decided for you.
Free will was such bullshit.
-Vishous's thoughts — J.R. Ward

The field of action of a photograph should be that chessboard of the heart and mind upon which poetry and art have always operated — Frederick Sommer

There were too many fires to put out. Too many pieces to move across the chessboard. — C.D. Reiss

Like looking down on a lubricious chess set, isn't it? The king moves in tiny steps, with no direction, like a drunkard trying to avoid the archer's bolt. The others work their strategies and wait for the old man to fall. He has no power, yet all power moves in his orbit and to his mad whim. Do you know there's no fool piece on the chessboard, Kent?" "Methinks the fool is the player, the mind above the moves. — Christopher Moore

Via the squares on the chessboard, the Indians explain the movement of time and the age, the higher influences which control the world and the ties which link Chess with the human soul — Al-Masudi

I study the chessboard and concede defeat.
"You can gain yourself in five moves" says the Colonel. "Worth fighting to the end. In five moves your opponent can err. No war is won or lost until the final battle is over. — Haruki Murakami

Discovered check is the dive bomber of the Chessboard — Reuben Fine

God, Bones, fuck me. I love you, I love you." The words hit like a cannon-ball on a flimsy chessboard, obliterating the entire battlefield in one blow. — Lucian Bane

... though queens are a particular obsession of mine. I'm not speaking of European sovereigns, mind you, but that most glorious force of the chessboard. Did you know her square was originally occupied by a male "vizier," able to advance only one meager diagonal step per move? But during the reign of the great female monarchs, this piece metamorphosed into a "queen," and her power grew commensurate with her title. Only then did the game become something more - A mental odyssey that helped reshape the world. — Brian K. Vaughan

It suddenly occurred to me that every move on the chessboard is old and has been played by somebody at some time. Maybe our own history has been played out by somebody at some time, and we just move our pieces about in the same moves to strike in the same way as people have always done. — Karel Capek

The world sometimes seems a chessboard where the pieces move themselves. I'm never sure what square to go to. Yet it can't be a difficult game, most folk play it instinctively. — Alasdair Gray

Wars should be fought with words, not bombs, not weapons. And calm words. I think that wars should be fought over a chessboard and a cup of something to drink. — Mattie Stepanek

The Chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem — Marcel Duchamp

To the sound of this voice, to the music of the chessboard's evil lure, Luzhin recalled, with the exquisite, moist melancholy peculiar to recollections of love, a thousand games that he had played in the past ... There were combinations, pure and harmonious, where thought ascended marble stairs to victory; there were tender stirrings in one corner of the board, and a passionate explosion, and the fanfare of the Queen going to its sacrificial doom. — Vladimir Nabokov

I could picture how Caprice was before we lost her. Dark hair, beautiful smile, intelligent hazel eyes, quick wit.
Now gone.
Just gone.
Like a chessboard where suddenly one of the knights disappeared. A blank spot on the board of life that could never truly be replaced because no two things were alike, no two beings alike. — Cheyenne McCray

All day, the colours had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapour, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the night, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit.
Sai, sitting on the veranda, was reading an article about giant squid in an old National Geographic. Every now and then she looked up at Kanchenjunga, observed its wizard phosphorescence with a shiver. The judge sat at the far corner with his chessboard, playing against himself. Stuffed under his chair where she felt safe was Mutt the dog, snoring gently in her sleep. A single bald lightbulb dangled on a wire above. It was cold, but inside the house, it was still colder, the dark, the freeze, contained by stone walls several feet deep. — Kiran Desai

I learnt an enormous amount, but there came a point where I found there was too much stress. It was no fun any more. Outside of the chessboard I avoid conflict, so I thought this wasn't worth it. — Magnus Carlsen

The stock market and the gridiron and the battlefield aren't as tidy as the chessboard, but in all of them, a single, simple rule holds true: make good decisions and you'll succeed; make bad ones and you'll fail. — Garry Kasparov

The center of the chessboard is a magnet, which pulls to itself all the pieces. — Ashot Nadanian

It is important that you don't let your opponent impose his style of play on you. A part of that begins mentally. At the chessboard if you start blinking every time he challenges you then in a certain sense you are withdrawing. That is very important to avoid. — Viswanathan Anand

You may knock your opponent down with the chessboard, but that does not prove that you are the better player. — Marc Lowrance

Within these premises, the only thing one can be is an impeccable mediator. One is not the player in this cosmic match of chess, one is simply a pawn on the chessboard. What decides everything is a conscious impersonal energy that sorcerers call intent or the Spirit. — Carlos Castaneda

That image of a chessboard - an epic contest between two giant players, carefully nudging their pieces around the globe as part of a grand strategy - has indeed become a familiar metaphor for the Cold War. But it is misleading. Many decisions remembered today for their farsighted, tactical brilliance were denounced in their day as weak-willed. And big, public gestures often made less difference than the small, hidden ones. — Sam Tanenhaus

It's time for us to join the line of your madmen all chained together.
Time to be totally free, and estranged.
Time to give up our souls, to set fire to structures and run out in the street.
Time to ferment.
How else can we leave the world-vat and go to the lip?
We must die to become true human beings.
We must turn completely upside down
like a comb in the top of a beautiful woman's hair.
Spread out your wings as a tree lifts in the orchard.
As seed scattered on the road,
as a stone melts to wax,
as a candle becomes the moth.
On a chessboard the king is blessed again with his queen.
With our faces so close to the love mirror, we must not breathe, but change to a cleared place where a building was and feel the treasure hiding inside us.
With no beginning or end,
we live in lovers as a story they know.
If you will be the key, we'll be tumblers in the lock. — Rumi

Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard, but takes the one before it and plays the game. — Wendell Phillips

Do you think sex will be even dirtier once we're divorced?" Patrick looks up from contemplating the chessboard. "Are you planning on sleeping with me after we're divorced?" Will's ears burn. "Would we have to stop?" Patrick — Leta Blake

The prohibition on promoting a pawn to a queen while the original queen was still on the board was an attempt to preserve the uniqueness of the king's wife, his only permissible conjugal mate according to Christian doctrine. The Arabic game did not have to face that problem because a Muslim ruler could theoretically have as many viziers as he wanted. The idea of multiple queens on the chessboard proved so anxiety-making for Europeans that it remained a subject of contention for centuries to come. — Marilyn Yalom

I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and to become slightly less happy. — Teju Cole

The carnage upon the chessboard of life, left wounded humans in its wake — Rohinton Mistry

Thus the city repeats its life, identical, shifting up and down on its empty chessboard. The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the acton changed; they repeat the same speeches with variously combined accents; they open alternate mouths in identical yawns. Alone, among all the cities of the empire, Eutropia remains always the same. Mercury, god of the fickle, to whom the city is sacred, worked this ambiguous miracle. — Italo Calvino

I have a house, with two big plasma-screen TVs, two dogs, a grill, chessboard. I like to keep it low-key: invite friends over, order some Papa John's pizzas and Coors Light, play poker and ping-pong and chill. I'm pretty private. — Jared Padalecki

Then Marco Polo spoke: Your chessboard, sire, is inlaid with two woods: ebony and maple. The square on which your enlightened gaze is fixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought: you see how its fibers are arranged? Here a barely hinted knot can be made out: a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night's frost forced it to desist. — Italo Calvino

The world is a chessboard, Madam, on which we play out our ploys and follies. You are the Queen, of course. Your moves are the strongest. For myself, I claim only to be a knight, advancing in a crooked progress. Do we move ourselves, do you think, or does a great gloved hand place on our squares — Catherine Fisher

An isolated pawn spreads gloom all over the chessboard. — Savielly Tartakower

I ask people what piece they are on the chessboard. And some people say 'I'm the king' or 'I'm the knight.' And then they ask me what piece I am, and I say, 'I'm no piece. I take the position of God.' — RZA

On the chessboard, if nowhere else, justice does triumph. — Irving Chernev

Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of each of us would some day depend upon our winning or losing a game of chess. Do you not think that we should all consider it to be our primary duty to learn at least the names of the pieces and how to position them on the chessboard? — Aldous Huxley

On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in the checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite. — Emanuel Lasker

-The timekiller?!
-Who is the killer?
-The time?
-Or the killer?
The answer is like a king in a pathless position on the chessboard. The answer is an eternel looser. It's fate is sealed up in the testament of Hades. The killer is mortal and he can't testify forever, but the time is biased, one-sided, partial, because it is timeless and a constant winner.
So, the circle is closed.
The game is over-checkmate! — Hristo Krstevski

A landscape glittered behind her voice. There were icicles in it and savage fields of ice, great storms boiling over a flat countryside striped with white rails - a chessboard beneath a storm. Horses were stretched forever at the gallop. Tiny men in silk were brave beyond bearing and sat on the horses like embryos with their knees in their mouths. The gorgeous names of horses were cried from mouth to mouth and circulated in a steam of fame. Lottery, The Hermit, the great mare Sceptre; the glorious ancestress Pocahontas, whose blood ran down like time into her flying children; Easter Hero, the Lamb, that pony stallion. — Enid Bagnold

The isolated Pawn casts gloom over the entire chessboard — Aron Nimzowitsch

Only Uncle Pascha ignored her. He was contemplating his chessboard. She doubted that he'd move his piece today. It had been his turn for only six months. Once, he had gone three years between moves. He preferred a leisurely game. — Sarah Beth Durst

I loathe being crimped into this deplorable position on the vampyre chessboard. — Poppet

Rather than opera, football is more like ballet or a chess game. You can really see it in a team like Arsenal, especially when Dennis Bergkamp was playing. He seemed to be able to read the game like a chessboard and knew where a player would be several seconds later and put the ball there for him. — Marcus Du Sautoy

Women's liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture - from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines - stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair or not, as the lead gender that never requested such a role, the historical male reputation is quite balanced.
For all of their perceived wrongs, over centuries they've moved entire civilizations forward, nurtured the human quest for discovery and industry, and led humankind from inconvenient darkness to convenient modernity. Navigating the chessboard that is human existence is quite a feat, yet one rarely acknowledged in modern academia or media. And yet for those monumental achievements, I love and admire the balanced creation that is man for all his strengths and weaknesses, his gifts and his curses. I would venture to say that most wise women do. — Tiffany Madison

Six nervous wives at the sink, each quiet as a queen on a chessboard. — Genie Frisbee

I believe that Chess possesses a magic that is also a help in advanced age. A rheumatic knee is forgotten during a game of chess and other events can seem quite unimportant in comparison with a catastrophe on the chessboard. — Vlastimil Hort

Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. — Zbigniew Brzezinski

What brings the whole back row of the chessboard to my modest little abode? — Taylor Anderson

But when you walk through yonder gate," Churchill said, pointing toward the Middle Tower at the end of the causeway, which was visible only as a crenellated cutout in the orange sky, "you'll find yourself in a London you no longer know. The changes wrought by the Fire were nothing. In that London, loyalty and allegiance are subtle and fluxional. 'Tis a chessboard with not only black and white pieces, but others as well, in diverse shades. You're a Bishop, and I'm a Knight, I can tell that much by our shapes, and the changes we have wrought on the board; but by fire-light 'Tis difficult to make out your true shade. — Neal Stephenson

Generals were early to bed, early to rise, always brushing their teeth after every meal, never skipping a morning shave. All they had to do was sit back in Nagano drawing up their battle plans. One order from them and us mortals on the front lines would move like pawns across a chessboard to our grisly fates. I'd like to see just one of them here with us in the mud. We had our own rules down here. Which is probably why they stayed away. If one of them showed, I'd see to it a stray bullet put them on the Killed In Action list. — Hiroshi Sakurazaka

It's not okay to send a feeble kid out to fight our battles, and it's not okay to push people around like pawns on a fuckin chessboard and it's not okay giving orders to kill like a Mafia boss. — Stephen King

The god inside the man glanced at Aly. "This is your chessboard, I believe, my dear."
Aly beamed at him. "So it is. And the game begins. — Tamora Pierce

Sorry for leaving without saying hi. But something came up as soon as I got there."

Now that wasn't going to do, so I pressed on. "Did you think I'd be there?"

He didn't come fast with a response. Instead, his absorbed smile pried my soul, my insides felt tensed, like a queen tiptoeing around the edge of a chessboard, wholly vulnerable in a game she knew nothing about. — C.C. Wyatt

And a most curious country it was. There were a number of tiny little brooks running straight across it from side to side, and the ground between was divided up into squares by a number of little green hedges, that reached from brook to brook.
I declare it's marked out just like a large chessboard!' Alice said at last. 'There ought to be some men moving about somewhere
and so there are!' she added in a tone of delight, and her heart began to beat quick with excitement as she went on. 'It's a great huge game of chess that's being played
all over the world
if this is the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it is! — Lewis Carroll

All that matters on the chessboard is good moves. — Bobby Fischer

Above the stage was a glass-floored second stage, which allowed customers to look up and watch another girl dancing overhead. This multidimensional display of poontang reminded me of the 3-D chessboard on Star Trek, which in turn reminded me that I was a huge nerd. — Diablo Cody

We're pieces on a chessboard and we make our moves when it's our turn. If we don't, our decisions are made for us. — A.P. Jensen

She reached toward the chessboard, and he caught her hand in his. "Believe me," he whispered. "When I wish to be, I can be very convincing." He followed the seam of her fingers with this thumb, tracing slowly upward until he reached the soft cleft below her knuckles. He watched as her eyes widened and her lips parted. Then he stroked the spot lightly - a quick, circular caress - and she made a little sound, half gasp and half sigh. That little sound - that tiny, panting breath - was very nearly his undoing. Jeremy knew that sound. It was the tumbler of a lock falling in place, the charged crackle between lightning and thunderbolt, the hiss of a candlewick the instant before it comes alive with flame. An incomplete sound. A sound that promised - and begged for - more. — Tessa Dare

When we talk about 'reproductive rights' this is what we mean. It's the difference between people as objects, and people as agents: between regarding people as pawns on the policy chessboard and recognizing them as the players, the decision-makers, the drivers of policy; autonomous individuals intimately concerned with the direction of their own lives. Under these conditions women, especially, enjoy better health and live fuller lives. — Nafis Sadik

And so, with a torn sleeve and a keyboard on which cigarette
ash can rest, writers ended up arsonists of recycled material with
a blanket over fast burning fires to send fragments of reality to the
sky for people to manage any way they wish. Or can." (intro "Throwing Dice on a Chessboard — Christos Rodoulla Tsiailis

Perhaps there is a reason that there is no fool piece on the chessboard. What action, a fool? What strategy, a fool? What use, a fool? Ah, but a fool resides in a deck of cards, a joker, sometimes two. Of no worth, of course. No real purpose. The appearance of a trump, but none of the power: Simply an instrument of chance. Only a dealer may give value to the joker. — Christopher Moore

Unchecked pride evolves into swagger, a hypnotizing mask of insecurity that can and does compromise our ability to make progress and attain power. Pride stands in the way of forgiveness and a strategic approach to navigating a chessboard rigged to prevent pawns from becoming kings and queens. — Jason Whitlock

Tactics and Checkmate in 1 move, show me some interesting stuff about chess... so far I can say that I see the chessboard different. — Deyth Banger

My codes says that... the world is based on a chessboard rule... First the White pieces then the black pieces... white.... black...white...black... and who is going to end that?

- Or this goes endless!?
( I need the limit..... I am not endless in my choices... I can't give you all... I can give you data with a limit.) — Deyth Banger

The first Embassy to Afghanistan by a western power left the Company's Delhi Residency on 13 October 1808, with the Ambassador accompanied by 200 calvary, 4,000 infantry, a dozen elephants and no fewer than 600 camels. It was dazzling, but it was also clear from this attempt to reach out to the Afghans that the British were not interested in cultivating Shah Shuja's friendship for its own sake, but were concerned only to outflank their imperial rivals: the Afghans were perceived as mere pawns on the chessboard of western diplomacy, to be engaged or sacrificed at will. It was a precedent that was to be followed many other times, by several different powers, over the years and decades to come; and each time the Afghans would show themselves capable of defending their inhospitable terrain far more effectively than any of their would-be manipulators could possibly have suspected. — William Dalrymple

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights. — Raymond Chandler

sometimes life presents Herculean obstacles. We are all but small participants on the chessboard of life. — Belle Ami