Seabiscuit: An American Legend Quotes

“Old Pops and I have got four good legs between us...Maybe that’s enough.”

“Maybe it was better to break a man’s leg than his heart.”

“Every time the horse set foot on the course, someone would cry out, ‘Here comes the Biscuit!’ and the track would come to a dead standstill.”

“It’s easy to talk to a horse if you understand his language. Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die. They are only changed by the way people treat them.”

“Character reigns preeminent in determining potential.”

“His body is a paradox of mass and lightness, crafted to slip through air with the ease of an arrow. His mind is impressed with a single command: run. He pursues speed with superlative courage, pushing beyond defeat, beyond exhaustion, sometimes beyond the structural limits of bone and sinew. In flight, he is nature’s ultimate wedding of form and purpose.”

“A thoroughbred racehorse is one of God’s most impressive engines.”

“I got a great ride...The greatest ride I ever got from the greatest horse that ever lived.”

“The racehorse, by virtue of his awesome physical gifts, freed the jockey from himself. When a horse and a jockey flew over the track together, there were moments in which the man’s mind wedded itself to the animal’s body to form something greater than the sum of both parts.”

“To pilot a racehorse is to ride a half-ton catapult. It is without question on of the most formidable feats in sport. The extraordinary athleticism of the jockey is unparalleled.”

“Why rate him? He knows the poles better than I do.”

“Man is preoccupied with freedom yet laden with handicaps. The breadth of his activity and experience is narrowed by the limitations of his relatively weak, sluggish body.”

“The whole country is divided into two camps...People who never saw a horse race in their lives are taking sides. If the issue were deferred another week, there would be a civil war between the War Admiral Americans and the Seabiscuit Americans.”

“The little horse had drawn more newspaper coverage in 1938 than Roosevelt, who was Second, Hitler (third), Mussolini (fourth), or any other newsmaker. His match with War Admiral was almost certainly the single biggest news story of the year and one of the biggest sports moments of the century.”

“We had to rebuild him, both mentally and physically, but you don’t have to rebuild the heart when it’s already there”

“The affection that this inarticulate brown horse had aroused...was a most amazing thing.”

“He had a colorless translucence about him that made him seem as if he were in the earliest stages of progressive invisibility.”

“He had no money and no home; he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books...The books were the closest things he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.”

“He believed with complete conviction that no animal was permanently ruined. Every horse could be improved. He lived by a single maxim: ‘Learn your horse. Each one is an individual, and once you penetrate his mind and heart, you can often work wonders with an otherwise intractable beast.‘”

“So long, Charley.”