Denny Emerson Quotes

If you do keep trying, there is no guarantee that you will succeed, but if you don’t keep trying, it is absolutely guaranteed that you will not succeed.

A tense rider can't feel her horse and the tense horse can't feel his rider.

What is the way forward?" one might ask, as I did. Well, better education, that's part of it, but most important, being willing and open enough to accept this education. That can be challenging, especially if the old way is getting results, ribbons, salary checks, names in the horse magazine headlines, and photos on the covers.

A good horseman or horsewoman is someone who, in an educated way, always puts the best interest of the horse first and foremost.

If you buy into some other person's negative assessment, pretty soon it becomes your negative assessment.

Don't expect the horse to answer the phone in the excitement and adrenaline rush of cross country if he hasn't had plenty of schooling while being ridden on the flat. We have to install those conditioned reflexes of accepting the half-halt in situations where he can learn, so when we truly need them, they are there.

Jack LeGoff used to have a joke about that (complete with French accent) "My horse is galloping flat and fast toward the big ditch and wall, all strung out. I pick up the telephone to dial the horse, but...there is no answer.

People will tell you in a hundred ways why you can't do something. The will tell you that you are too young, too old, too short,too fat, too thin, too timid, too this, too that, and they will try to make you believe it, and if you do believe it, you will never know whether what they told you was impossible is actually impossible, or just somebody else trying to put limits on you.

There's no rule that says someone has to ride or drive or have a hands-on connection tog et joy from horses; some sponsor a young rider, work with horse-rescue organizations, build saddles, or write horse books. Others read horse books, and still others have horses as pasture pets and never ride them but get a great deal of pleasure from the company of their horses and from just taking care of them. The only person you have to please is yourself.

NATURE MORTE You are given two things today, one is an angry nail in your side; Changing what you are able to sense is the second thing you are gifted. Nature is always a referred existence, writes Emerson, never a presence. Who knows where the time goes, sings Sandy Denny. Who can bear to hear it? One reaches the moment when one loses words—in the pastoral, in the cosmic? Think about the scars on the planets, & how patient those stars seem to be. I am painting the natural landscape with my eyes closed today. It is like writing A poem with all the cross-outs left in; an expression like never thought I’d see the day. Nature that begins with unknowable & ends with more monotonous hills. Today, I want to be the country-fried philosophe or a Hudson River School painting. When this life is over, describe to me how its concave & convex forms are & are not. We live amid surfaces, writes Emerson, & the true art of life is to skate well on them.