Top 100 Quotes About Rowing
#1. Every good rowing coach, in his own way, imparts to his men the kind of self-discipline required to achieve the ultimate from mind, heart, and body. Which is why most ex-oarsmen will tell you they learned more fundamentally important lessons in the racing shell than in the classroom.
Daniel James Brown
#2. I stopped rowing for a moment to glug down some water, but it was warm, tasted of plastic, and failed to refresh. I yearned for an ice-cold drink - preferably one with bubbles and alcohol in it.
Roz Savage
#3. Not everyone wants this conventional little life you're rowing your boat toward. I like my river of fire. And when it's time for me to go I fully intend to roll off my one-person dinghy into the flames and be consumed. I'm not afraid.
Zadie Smith
#4. I always envisioned myself as traveling the ocean of life in a rowboat where my mother was one oar and my father, the other. Having two good, solid oars made rowing much easier.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#5. Every student of physics knows the axiom 'nature abhors a vacuum.' A little known corollary is that 'rowing coaches detest sending their crews in early.' Coaches will always find something to fill the end-of-practice vacuum.
Brad Alan Lewis
#6. Ruth Bracket's arms moved backward and forward in rhythmic motion. She was rowing, yet no sound came from her oarlocks. Oars and oarlocks were padded. She liked it best that way. Why? Mystery - that magic word "mystery." How she loved it!
Mildred A. Wirt
#7. You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without doubt,I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.
Mary Oliver
#8. It was like falling off a building and suddenly, bang, you hit the bottom. The first time it happened was on an ordinary day at home. I was taking down some curtains. I took one step, turned around, took another step and then I fell and hit my head hard on the rowing machine.
Jonah Lomu
#9. Rowing was not simple for me. I nodded whenever the instructor made a point, as if I understood, but I could as easily have assembled the space shuttle as have repeated the moves she was explaining.
Barry S. Strauss
#10. In rowing, you're always striving for that perfect stroke, that repetition, each one being as good as the last. Same thing with cooking. You can't say, 'Oh, I don't feel well, so I'm going to put out a crappy plate.'
Bryan Volpenhein
#11. The ship is going by a mighty engine, and you are busy rowing.
Mooji
#12. I think I have experience in rowing, and that has given me some ability to go about racing. I'm lucky genetically. I have a good VO2 max - I can hold a lot of air in my lungs - and that definitely helps.
Bryan Volpenhein
#14. He always had to know who was going. I swear, if that guy was shipwrecked somewhere, and you rescued him in the god damn boat, he'd want to know who the guy that was rowing it before he'd even get in.
J.D. Salinger
#15. Rowing it was pointed out, was a sport that risked few injuries. So it was, I ould discover, but only if you did it right.
Barry S. Strauss
#16. Americans generally associate boats with leisure. Vastly less prosperous, Egyptians associate them with nothing but labour. Rowing a boat is something a fisherman is forced to do to make a living; how could such an activity bring me - a woman no less - pleasure?
Rosemary Mahoney
#17. If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.
Patrick Lencioni
#18. Rowing is a simple sport stuffed up by experts
Roger Moore
#19. Physiologists, in fact, have calculated that rowing a two-thousand-meter race - the Olympic standard - takes the same physiological toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back. And it exacts that toll in about six minutes. A well-conditioned oarsman or oarswoman
Daniel James Brown
#20. The single sculler, alone on the river at dawn, or spotlighted in his lane during a race, is th emost romantic, the most quixotic figure in all rowing.
Barry S. Strauss
#21. Picasso spent hundereds of hours carefully planning his masterpieces. The sketchbooks were filled with ideas, bits and pieces, test runs, none of it meant to be seen by anyone. In a similar way, rowing practices are our sketchbooks, where we prepared our raceday masterpiece.
Brad Alan Lewis
#22. Gough was a serious student but found time to gain a blue in rowing; he was later to say that the sport was an apt one for men in public life because you could face one way while going in the other.
Mungo MacCallum
#23. When a politician states that we are all in the same boat, be on Your guard. Does it mean that YOU are supposed to be doing all the rowing?
Vilhelm Moberg
#25. Internally, you experience rowing as a graphic microcosm of life - solitude, learning, work, rest, nourishment, sharing and ultimately challenge.
Allen Rosenberg
#26. No,' answered Pen sullenly. 'We're not rowing. I was just . . . telling Triss something I thought she ought to do. Loudly.
Anonymous
#27. Rowing against the tide is hard and uncertain. To go with the tide and thus take advantage of the workings of the great natural force is safe and easy.
Ralph Waldo Trine
#28. I climbed on the rowing ergometer, and started to pull - losing myself in the rhythm of sweat and pain.
Stefan Kieszling
#30. [G]rowing into your future with health and grace and beauty doesn't have to take all your time. It rather requires a dedication to caring for yourself as if you were rare and precious, which you are, and regarding all life around you as equally so, which it is. (267-268)
Victoria Moran
#31. Physically, rowing was remarkable resistant to the camera ... the camera liked power exhibited more openly, and the power of the oarsmen [is] exhibited in far too controlled a setting. Besides, the camera liked to focus on individuals, and except for the single scull, crew was sport without faces.
David Halberstam
#32. Joe, when you really start trusting those other boys, you will feel a power at work within you that is far beyond anything you've ever imagined. Sometimes, you will feel as if you have rowed right off the planet and are rowing among the stars.
Daniel James Brown
#33. Rowing harder doesn't help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction.
Kenichi Ohmae
#34. There are always a lot of people so afraid of rocking the boat that they stop rowing. We can never get ahead that way.
Harry S. Truman
#35. Winning a rowing race is not like winning anything else. Here's my theory: you're facing backwards, so you're looking at the people you're beating
and there's something exquisite about that.
Hugh Laurie
#37. Maybe the future is like rowing for shore. Your only choice is to try or give up.
Kristen Chandler
#38. Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir, Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, With a cargo of ivory, And apes and peacocks, Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.
John Masefield
#39. The thing about rowing, you face backward. Always looking into the past, never the future. Always seeing what you're losing, never what you've got to gain.
Joe Abercrombie
#40. Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back.
- Chinese proverb
Alvin Toffler
#41. In rowing as in life, there are competitors and there are racers. The competitor works hard and rows to his limit. The racer does not think of limits, only the race.
Jim Dietz
#42. In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
Ernest Hemingway,
#43. Bad habits are like having a sumo wrestler in the back of your canoe rowing the opposite direction.
J. Loren Norris
#44. Rowing is a sport for dreamers. As long as you put in the work, you can own the dream.
Jim Dietz
#45. A tale begun in other days,
When summer suns were glowing -
A simple chime, that served to time
The rhythm of your rowing -
Whose echoes live in memory yet,
Though envious years would say 'forget.
Lewis Carroll
#46. Without a doubt, rowing is the hardest thing you can attempt to lean in a short period of time.
Eric Bana
#47. An Olympic rowing career had left Porter Collins a bit inured to the pain of others, as he assumed they usually didn't know what pain was. No,
Michael Lewis
#48. It's great to see the World Rowing Championships returning to U.S. soil for the first time in 25 years. I am even more excited that it will be taking place in my home state of Florida. Regardless of where my rowing career takes me, I am sure to be in attendance in Sarasota in 2017.
Stephen Young
#49. Swimming and athletics are the big gigs at the Olympic games. Cycling and rowing are pretty big for Britain, but globally, the two big things are athletics and swimming.
Clare Balding
#50. No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#51. Take a look at your natural river. What are you? Stop playing games with yourself. Where's your river going? Are you riding with it? Or are you rowing against it? Don't you see that there is no effort if you're riding with your river?
Frederick Carl Frieseke
#52. Stopped rowing as the liquid run of that glad piping broke on him like a wave, caught him up, and possessed him utterly.
Kenneth Grahame
#53. The difficulty in weaning the mind from worldly thoughts, from external objects, and fixing it on God is the same as in making the Ganga flow towards Gangotri instead of its natural flow towards Ganga-Sagar. It is like rowing against the current of the Yamuna.
Sivananda Saraswati
#54. Rowing is an absurdly simple sport. I can easily guide a beginner throught the right technical motions. The difficulty arises when the beginner attempts to repeat those motions on a bumpy race course, at 40 strokes a minute, with his heart rate zooming, and an opponent charging up his stern.
Brad Alan Lewis
#56. Virtue dwells at the head of a river, to which we cannot get but by rowing against the stream.
Owen Feltham
#57. I think that's why I coach.. I used to get up early every morning with a clear goal in mind of how fast I was going to be. When I stopped rowing, there was a void in my daily routine. Now I go to bed at night and get up morning with a clear goal in mind of how fast you are going to be.
Christopher Allsopp
#58. The hardest part of rowing properly: Eyes and Minds in The Boat!
Phillip Thomas
#59. Now, in my middle age,
about nineteen in the head I'd say,
I am rowing, I am rowing ...
Anne Sexton
#60. Most people are rowing against the current of life. Instead of turning the boat around, all they need to do is let go of the oars.
Esther Hicks
#61. If rowing is a trial then the ergometer is the courtroom, the meter is the jury. And an honest jury at that, because the numbers do not lie.
Barry S. Strauss
#62. Competition in rowing doesn't just come from other countries. It comes from Wall Street, med school, law school. You think Harvard and Princeton grads want to live in Chula Vista?
Mike Teti
#63. There's way more pressure cooking for cooks than rowing at the Olympics.
Bryan Volpenhein
#64. All my life I've been rowing against the tide. What can I do? It seems I was born that way.
Jose Mujica
#65. Once one is beyond a certain level of commitment to the sport, life begins to seem an allegory of rowing rather than rowing an allegory of life.
Stefan Kieszling
#66. I must keep on rowing, not until I reach port but until I reach my grave.
Madame De Stael
#67. I went to university (Brown), I worked as a designer, I competed in Olympic sport (rowing) ... and I ended up being a musician. It's in the DNA, I guess.
Dhani Harrison
#68. I started rowing in December 1995. The place was Association Nautique Faontainbleau in France. A friend of mine from middle school told me that I should join him 3 times a week for rowing because my hands were so big that I would'nt require oars to row.
Xeno Muller
#69. There is a place where cerebral an corporeal meet: they call it rowing
Barry S. Strauss
#70. The greatest poet who ever wrote about rowing is Virgil, the greatest historian is Thucydides, but the greatest imagination ever to turn its attention to the sport is that of painter, Thomas Eakins.
Barry S. Strauss
#71. Ocean rowing is very much what you make it. Rowing technique is pretty irrelevant on the ocean. It's the psychology that's important.
Roz Savage
#72. The ergometer simulates the physical demands of rowing, packaging the pains with none of the amenities that make it worthwhile ...
Stefan Kieszling
#73. That evening, rowing on the quiet river as sunset turned to dusk, I saw an occasional smoky smudge on the towpath, always slightly ahead of me, like a dark star guiding me home.
Deborah Harkness
#74. Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.
William, Saroyan
#75. Rowing provided a place to go, a community where people cared about what I did and what I achieved.
Nancy Greene
#76. For a thorough understanding of rowing, for the what, the how and the why, the books making up Peter Mallory's The Sport of Rowing certainly do it all.
Anita DeFrantz
#77. Rowing is such a fine sport. Everyone goes backward, and the leader can see his opponents as they struggle in vain.
Brad Alan Lewis
#78. I have a big barn that I converted to my music studio, so I go there early in the morning and the first thing I do is rowing. And that's when I listen to a lot of music.
Tod Machover
#79. The spotlight kept rowing back and forth across the face of the ridge. Methodically. Bright shuttle, dark loom.
Cormac McCarthy
#80. In terms of pure physical effort, today was probably as hard as I've worked in any part. I spent the morning rowing, including the change of speeds Arrius [the Roman commander] test Judah with. A real bone-breaker.
Charlton Heston
#81. Harmony, balance, and rhythm. They're the three things that stay with you your whole life. Without them civilization is out of whack. And that's why an oarsman, when he goes out in life, he can fight it, he can handle life. That's what he gets from rowing.
Daniel James Brown
#82. I train very hard, either rowing on the cross trainer or running. Not only do you feel tired afterwards but it relaxes you, it completely clears the head. But to sort things out I also like to walk.
Barry McGuigan
#83. When one rows it is not the rowing which moves the ship: rowing is only a magical ceremony by means of which one compels a demon to move the ship.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#84. If you want to know why you didn't make a boat
I'll tell you. You're just out there hammering the water. You're killing fish, not rowing.
Jim Dietz
#85. Trouble was, everyone always made talking out a problem sound like it was so simple and solved everything, but actually doing it, and securing the desired outcome without screwing up, seemed about as easy as rowing upriver with a teaspoon.
Babette James
#86. I have been out again on the river, rowing. I find nothing new.
Fanny Kemble
#87. Yet my great-grandfather was but a water-man, looking one way and rowing another: and I got most of my estate by the same occupation.
John Bunyan
#88. Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.
Edward Abbey
#89. The children had been using these spatulas as oars, but rowing a boat is very hard work, particularly if one's traveling companions are too busy bragging to help out, and Violet was trying to think of a way they might move the boat faster.
Lemony Snicket
#95. And all the way, to guide their chime, With falling oars they kept their time.
Andrew Marvell
#97. She seemed to see a flash of bright sunlight on dark green water, fragmented into brilliant shards by the splashing rise and fall of oars.
J.K. Rowling
#98. To follow the drops sliding from a lifting oar, Head up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward ...
Theodore Roethke
#99. While power is important, efficiency is critical. Many have worked hard and gone slow.
Drew Ginn
#100. The concentration of all seven behind the stroke should be so strong that you know by feel when that stroke has varied his style or rating without the cox announcing it.
Phillip Thomas
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