Great Running Back Quotes & Sayings

There is a gesture he has, a motion, that always reminds me of a great batter leaning into a hit. He has a way of throwing one foot forward, putting his head down a bit as he silently runs the valves, and then the cheeks bloom out in the way that has mystified his dentist for years, and he hits into the solo. When that foot goes forward like that, you know that John Birks Gillespie is no longer clowning. Stand back. — Gene Lees

What Whileawayans Celebrate

The full moon
The Winter solstice (You haven't lived if you haven't seen us running around in our skivvies, banging on pots and pans, shouting "Come back, sun! Goddammit, come back! Come back!")
The Summer solstice (rather different)
The autumnal equinox
The vernal equinox
The flowering of trees
The flowering of bushes
The planting of seeds
Happy copulation
Unhappy copulation
Longing
Jokes
Leaves falling off the trees (where deciduous)
Acquiring new shoes
Wearing same
Birth
The contemplation of a work of art
Marriages
Sport
Divorces
Anything at all
Nothing at all
Great ideas
Death — Joanna Russ

I wandered in the streets, what with the noise the people made, the number of the coaches, the running of the footmen, the swaggering of great courtiers, and the thrusting aside of everybody, many a time I longed to be back among the sheep again, for fear of losing my peacefulness of spirit. — R.D. Blackmore

Sydney, don't leave Adrian because of me."
"It's more complicated than that," I said automatically.
"It's really not," she said. "From everything I've seen and heard, you're just afraid. You've always controlled every detail of your life. When you couldn't-like with the Alchemists-you found a way to seize back that control."
"There is nothing wrong with wanting control," I snapped.
"Except that we can't always have it, and sometimes that is a good thing. A great thing, even," she added. "And that's how it is with Adrian. No matter how hard you try, you aren't going to be able to control your feelings for him. You can't help loving him, and so you're running away. I'm just an excuse. — Richelle Mead

when a football player steps on a field, he should do it all. I realize a great running back doesn't like to play defense, but life isn't based on what you like. If everyone did what he liked to do, we'd be in real trouble. — Brian Curtis

In order to understand the conditions we are in, we must place ourselves not in the mainstream of life but in the timeless stream of myth. As the fabric of life loosens, the veil between this world of hard facts and the otherworld of great imagination also becomes thinner and more permeable. Just as time seems to be running out, timeless things try to slip back into human awareness. — Michael Meade

Between New York and L.A., and all of us who are actors, I feel like we're just one big, cast repertory company, all running back and forth between the coasts and between different shows. There is a wealth of great character actors, who show up, here and there, on different shows. I love the fact that we're allowed to do that. — Denis O'Hare

I dreamed of going to the top of Mount Elum like Alexander the Great to touch Jupiter and even beyond the valley. But, as I watched my brother running across the roof, flying their kites and skillfully flicking the strings back and forth to cut each other's down, I wondered hoe free a daughter could ever be. — Malala Yousafzai

Teachers have had a great effect on me as a child. I've always loved school and had a great appetite for learning. I cried when it was time to go back home and tried to jump from my mother's moving car to run back there. — Alison Hawthorne Deming

Wandering around back stage at a willie Nelson concert is a bit like being the parrot on the shoulder of the guy who's running the Ferris wheel. It's not the best seat in the house, but you see enough lights, action, people, and confusion to make you wonder if anybody knows what the hell's going on. If you're sitting out front, of course, it all rolls along as smoothly as a German train schedule, but as Willie, like any great magician, would be the first to point out, the real show is never in the center ring. As Willie always says, Fortunately, we're not in control. — Kinky Friedman

Playing the running back position, your legs, that's your living, that's how you make your living. You have to have great thighs, knees, everything. — Eric Dickerson

Rock & Roll is so great, people should start dying for it. You don't understand. The music gave you back the beat so you could dream. A whole generation running with a Fender bass...

The people just have to die for the music. People are dying for everything else, so why not the music? Die for it. Isn't it pretty? Wouldn't you die for something pretty?

Perhaps I should die. After all, all the great blues singers did die. But life is getting better now.

I don't want to die. Do I? - Lou Reed (1965-1968) — Legs McNeil

An elephant fell off a cliff, a copper cliff, which practically broke my heart. Elephants and gravity, not a great mix. But you know what? The other elephants immediately stopped and went down and found what was left of it and stood around it in a ring. I couldn't see what they did, but when they were done - it took a day - the one that fell was all back together and up and running again. They resurrected him, I've never seen anything like it. Elephants, they know some shit. I don't know why we rule them, they should rule us. — Lev Grossman

If we want to identify the great success of American research universities, and that success goes far beyond Harvard, we have to come back to the question of governance. Excellence requires a firewall between trusteeship, or government ministries, and the academic decision-making process. This American concept of shared governance wherein the faculty are engaged in running the university as part of a collaboration with the other stakeholders. — Henry Rosovsky

Someone who has juggled the ball in the air during a game, after which four defenders of the opponent get the time to run back, that's the player people think is great. I say he has to go to a circus. — Johan Cruijff

I think it's relatively easy to play defense against a team that can only do one thing. Unfortunately, that's not what we're talking about here with Seattle. They have a great running back - they have a great group of running backs - but Lynch obviously is really kind of in a class by himself. The quarterback's a problem, the receivers are a problem, they have a good offensive line. — Bill Belichick

Every culture that's ever existed has operated under the illusion that it understood 95% of reality and that the other 5% would be delivered in the next 18 months, and from Egypt forward they've been running around believing they had a perfect grip on things and yet we look back at every society that preceded us with great smugness at how naive they all were. Well, it never occurs to us, then, that maybe we're whistling in the dark too! That the universe is stranger than you CAN suppose, and that that openness that that perception imparts is a great joy, a great blessing, because then you can live your life not in service to some fascistic metaphor but in service to the living mystery: the fact that you're not going to understand it; it is not going to yield to logic; or magic; or any other technique that's been developed ... — Terence McKenna

Emmitt Smith is a great running back. One of the things I like about him along with Edgerrin James is that neither one of them 'show out' when they run a touchdown. — Earl Campbell

Knowledge has two extremes. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great minds, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same natural ignorance from which they set out; this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself. — Blaise Pascal

Running has never failed to give me great end results, and that's why I keep coming back for more! — Sasha Azevedo

He felt twilight. Not there seemed to be some kind of wet light traveling over his legs and stomach with a deeply attractive smell. It wound itself-this wet light- all about him, splashing and running into his skin. He opened his eyes and saw what he imagined was the great wing of an eagle pouring a wet lightness over him. Some kind of baptism, some kind of blessing, he thought. Everything is going to be all right, it said. Knowing that it was so he closed his eyes and sank back into the bright hole of sleep. — Toni Morrison

They walked gingerly across the junk-filled vacant lots to the local abattoir - a place of infinite fascination, with its strange sights and stranger smells.
It was a thrill - because it outraged their every sense of animal love - to watch the killings. To see calm, innocent cattle led one by one into that room with the fetid smells and the stained, concrete floor always a'swish with running water. To see brawny, heavy-set Gus Milner and his equally big son, Charley, slip the snubbing rope through the ring in the cow's nose, and relentlessly draw its head down and down until its nose touched the heavy ring set in the floor, then fasten it.
Their hearts did strange nip-ups just back of their mouths as one of the men would pick up the heavy sledge, and with one great, perfectly aimed blow, strike the animal just between and a bit above the eyes. They always jumped at the sudden slump as the carcass dropped, spraddled and lifeless, to the floor.
("The Shed") — E. Everett Evans

The man in the tan jacket was running out to the desert. She could just barely see him at the edge of the parking lot's radius of light. His arms were swinging wildly, his suitcase swinging along. His legs were flailing, great puffs of sand kicked up behind him, his head thrown back, sweat running down his face visible even from where she sat. The kind of run that was from something and not toward. Then he left the faint edge of the light and was gone. — Joseph Fink

Oh, I beg your pardon! she exclaimed in a tone of great dismay, and began picking them up again as quickly as she could, for the accident of the gold-fish kept running in her head, and she had a vague sort of idea that they must be collected at once and put back into the jury-box, or they would die. — Lewis Carroll

(On returning to Austin to run at his collegiate stadium) It is almost like coming home with the crowd, the people, and it just brings it home for me. For me, it is a very special place, it is great energy, and again I always seem to run very well here. So I love coming back. — Leonel Manzano

Thank you," Becky whispered ... "I wouldn't have survived that stool. It would have been 'Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.'"
With rings on your fingers and bells on your toes even, " he said.
"Curious that meeting you is more nursery rhyme than fairy tale. If I see a farmer's wife with a butcher's knife, I'm running and not looking back."
"And I'll have no nonsense from my dish and spoon. — Shannon Hale

The story he [Todd Willingham] told me was this: He woke up to a fire. He ran out of the house and couldn't run back in to save his children, and that was enough to get me interested ... There's a writer in me that's like, ... this is a great story ... I have a good friend, who was my neighbor at the time, and I told her about it ... She had been a reporter, and she was like, "Let's go investigate it." — Elizabeth Gilbert

I have been running all about; I have knocked again at all the doors of my youth and desired to enter in there; I thought, surely it must admit me again, for I am still young and have wished so much to forget; but it fled always before me like a will-o'-the-wisp; it fell away without a sound; it crumbled like tinder at my lightest touch. And I could not understand.
Surely here at least something of it must remain? I attempted it again and again, and as a result made myself merely ridiculous and wretched. But now I know. I know now that a still, silent war has ravaged this country of my memories also; I know now it would be useless for me to look farther. Time lies between like a great gulf; I cannot get back. There is nothing for it; I must go forward, march onward, anywhere; it matters nothing, for I have no goal — Erich Maria Remarque

Another thing I like to do is sit back and take in nature. To look at the birds, listen to their singing, go hiking, camping and jogging and running, walking along the beach, playing games and sometimes being alone with the great outdoors. It's very special to me. — Larry Wilcox

As a writer you're holding a dog. You let the dog run about. But you finally can pull him back. Finally, I'm in control. But the great excitement is to see what happens if you let the whole thing go. And the dog or the character really runs about, bites everyone in sight, jumps up trees, falls into lakes, gets wet, and you let that happen. That's the excitement of writing plays-to allow the thing to be free but still hold the final leash. — Harold Pinter

All men die, Genghis. All. Think what it means for a moment. None of us are remembered for more than one or two generations." He raised a hand as Genghis opened his mouth to speak again. "Oh, I know we chant the names of great khans by the fireside and the Chin have libraries running back for thousands of years. What of it? Do you think it matters to the dead that their names are read aloud? They don't care, Genghis. They are gone. The only thing that matters is what they did while they were alive. — Conn Iggulden

The great enemy of creativity is fear. When we're fearful, we freeze up - like a nine-year-old who won't draw pictures, for fear everybody will laugh. Creativity has a lot to do with a willingness to take risks. Think about how children play. They run around the playground, they trip, they fall, they get up and run some more. They believe everything will be all right. They feel capable; they let go. Good businesspeople behave in a similar way: they lose $15 million, gain $20 million, lose $30 million and earn it back. If that isn't playing, I don't know what is! — Faith Ringgold