Quotes About Helen Wills

#1. I've never cared that much for cementing my place in history. Sports is so transitory, so ephemeral. It just seems like so much nonsense comparing me to Helen Wills Moody or Suzanne Lenglen or anybody else from some other time. One lesson you learn from sports is that life goes on without you.

Billie Jean King

#2. There are many stars and a few super-stars in sport. There are champions who bag a coronet now and then, and there are others who dominate some game year after year. In other words there are Bobby Jones and Helen Wills.

Grantland Rice

#3. I love the feel of hitting the ball hard, the pleasure of a rally. It is these things that make tennis the delightful game that it is.

Helen Wills Moody

#4. It's the deep breath before the plunge.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#5. My feelings, as the last ball travelled over the net, and as I realized that the final match was mine, I cannot describe. I felt that here was a prize for all the games I had ever played.

Helen Wills Moody

#6. Mathematics is for lazy people.

Peter Hilton

#7. I am not always happy with the compliments Estonia has received.

Lennart Meri

#8. I hope you are looking forward to the tsunami of industrial effluent which is coming your way in the first quarter of the new year. You will not be able to avoid it, unless you are Helen Keller. One way or another, Wills and Kate are going to get you.

Rod Liddle

#9. If you give what can be takes, you are not really giving.
Take what you are given, not what you want to be given.
Take what is given:
Give what cannot be taken.

Idries Shah

#10. I am wonderful creation of God.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#11. Technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning.

Langdon Winner

#12. When I play, I become entirely absorbed in the game. It may be a form of concentration.

Helen Wills Moody

#13. Balls should be good for at least six sets, and for more for the average player. But if the rallies are long, they do not last as long as this. There is a fuzz on the surface that wears off on the hard court.

Helen Wills Moody

#14. Unless a player goes in for intensive play and tournament competition, two racquets are sufficient.

Helen Wills Moody

#15. The seeded draw came into being. This means that the two best players of the tournament are placed in opposite halves in the draw, and cannot possibly meet until the finals, if they come through successfully against all the rest of the participants.

Helen Wills Moody

#16. I came to Hollywood and I loved it. It was a great time, but in my head I was still elsewhere, in Europe. I believed in a certain cinema, which I still do believe in - a certain European cinema - and as a young woman being in America, I thought I was being taken away from that.

Valeria Golino

#17. Four times out of five the linesman gets a better view of the ball near him than the player himself.

Helen Wills Moody

#18. There is no game like the direct attack. Fancy strokes, while effective to watch, do not bring the results a fast driving game does.

Helen Wills

#19. I can remember when, as a beginner, I was delighted with any ball as long as it would bounce.

Helen Wills Moody

#20. She actually isn't so bad, now that I'm getting to know her. She's just a little messy on the outside. But aren't we all?

S. Elle Cameron

#21. No player can become accustomed to New York's climate in August in a few days. The playing conditions, the courts in New York and France are very different.

Helen Wills Moody

#22. The health of democracy, not its hate, is its best propaganda.

Judith C. Waller

#23. The angle from which the line and ball are seen makes a tremendous difference in the call, and the player who is inclined to fret inwardly about decisions should realize this.

Helen Wills Moody

#24. The 1927 Wimbledon finals were almost put off because of the rain, which threatened every moment.

Helen Wills Moody

#25. Black as night, sweet as sin.

Neil Gaiman

#26. Concerning the limits and limitations of the women's game - why should we believe there are any?

Helen Wills

#27. Spectators often express disfavor of fair decisions.

Helen Wills Moody

#28. It wasn't that I wanted a husband and a baby; I didn't, or rather, I only wanted them the way I wanted to live to a hundred: someday, far off, never thinking about the particulars.

Naomi Novik

#29. Psychology must not only strive to become a useful basis for the other mental sciences, but it must also turn again and again to the historical sciences, in order to obtain an understanding for the more highly developed metal processes.

Wilhelm Wundt

#30. I was struck to my heart and through my heart, knocked clean out of my ordinary life.

Stephen King

#31. But none of them bless themselves after saying 'hell' or make me crazy to see them smile.

Tessa Bailey

#32. If you see a tennis player who looks as if he is working hard, that means he isn't very good.

Helen Wills