Archery Sports Quotes

Archery is definitely easier outside, as I can attest after that one time I tried target practice in my father's throne room. And driving the sun...well, that's not really an indoor sport either.

There it is. Chemistrie. Professor Astrid Volya. I glance back over at Andras. “What’s her son like?” I wonder. “He’s quiet,” Aislinn whispers, looking over at him. “And he’s amazingly good at every sport: sword fighting, ax throwing, archery, you name it. And he’s a natural with horses, just like his mother. That’s his job. He cares for the horses stabled here. The Amaz can talk to their horses, you know—with their minds. He’s a skilled horse healer, too. Last year one of the Gardnerian military apprentices took a nasty fall on his horse, and the horse’s leg was broken. The animal was so wild with pain, no one could get near it. But Andras could. Within a week, he had the horse good as new.

The portrait had been discovered in 1860 when Mr. William Oakes Hunt, the town clerk of Stratford, employed a visiting art expert named Simon Collins to examine a group of portraits long lodged inside the Hunt attic. These paintings were believed to have descended from the aristocratic Clopton family. Mr. Hunt recalled as a child using the portraits for archery practice, but by 1860 he’d become curious as to their value. When hired to appraise these attic portraits, Simon Collins had just finished the prestigious job of restoring Stratford’s world-famous funerary bust of Shakespeare that hovered like a putty-nosed wraith over the poet’s tomb in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church. Posed with pen and paper while sporting the pickdevant-styled pointy beard and up-brushed mustache popular from 1570 to 1600, the bust has long been championed as one of the most authentic likenesses of the poet; nevertheless, back in 1793 a curator named Edmond Malone had decided to whitewash the entire bust, which until then had been unique in portraying Shakespeare wearing a blood-red jerkin beneath a black sleeveless jacket.

I had built a structure of perfectionism and workaholism on the pillars of performance-based esteem. This structure rested on a foundation of my shame, some of which was brought on by trauma and some of which was inherited, as children take on the shame of those around them. But all of it was exacerbated by my own vicious cycle of self-loathing and guilt for my actions. It’s not a coincidence that I have gravitated toward sports that demand perfection, like archery and driving race cars.