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Friend, no one ever accomplishes your dreams for you, regardless of tears, fits, or any other means of manipulation. They can give you ideas and direction, but in the end, you have to do it alone. You must figure out your own destination and the best route to get there because no one else knows the way.
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Nadia Comaneci (Letters to a Young Gymnast (Art of Mentoring))
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Friendships are fragile and must be protected, because once broken, they can’t always be fixed.
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Eloise Smith (Winner Takes Gold: an all-action gymnastics story for ages 10+)
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Apart from these parental physical jerks, he did not train his body; he merely inhabited it. A friend had once shown what he called gymnastics for the intelligentsia. You took a box of matches and threw its contents on the floor, then bent down and picked them up, one by one. The first time he tried it himself, he lost patience and stuffed all the matches back in handfuls. He persevered, but the next time, just as he was bending down, the telephone went, and he was needed at once; so the housekeeper was detailed to pick up the matches instead.
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Julian Barnes (The Noise of Time)
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He had, indeed, one of those advantages which men who had lived and moved in the world enjoy over others, even men of intelligence and refinement, who have never gone into society, namely that they no longer see it transfigured by the longing or repulsion with which it fills the imagination, but regard it as quite unimportant. Their good nature, freed from all taint of snobbishness and from the fear of seeming too friendly, grown independent, in fact, has the ease, the grace of movement of a trained gymnast each of whose supple limbs will carry out precisely the movement that is required without any clumsy participation by the rest of his body.
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Marcel Proust (Du côté de chez Swann (À la recherche du temps perdu, #1))
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I cannot help feeling there is something essentially wrong about love. Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love. Friendship never has that doomed look. Why, what is the matter? I have not stopped loving you, but because I cannot go on kissing your dim dear face, we must part, we must part. Why is it so? What is this mysterious exclusiveness? One may have a thousand friends, but only one love-mate. Harems have nothing to do with this matter: I am speaking of dance, not gymnastics. Or can one imagine a tremendous Turk loving every one of his four hundred wives as I love you? For if I say ‘two’ I have started to count and there is no end to it. There is only one real number: One. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.
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Vladimir Nabokov (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight)
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There is nothing that you can do to win someone or something that is not meant to be yours. You can fight with everything you have. You can hold on for as long as you can. You can force yourself into mental gymnastics to pick apart signs. You can have your friends read into texts and emails. You can decide that you know what’s best for you and right for you. Mostly, you can wait. You can wait forever. What isn’t right for you will never remain in your life. There is no job, person, or city that you can force to be right for you if it is not, though you can pretend for a while. You can play games with yourself, you can justify and make ultimatums. You can say you’ll try just a little longer, and you can make excuses for why things aren’t working out right now. The truth is that what is right for you will come to you and stay with you and won’t stray from you for long. The truth is that when something is right for you, it brings you clarity, and when something is wrong for you, it brings you confusion. You get stuck when you try to make something that’s wrong for you right. When you try to force it into a place in your life in which it doesn’t belong. You get split; you breed this internal conflict which you cannot resolve. The more it intensifies, the more you mistake it for passion. How could you ever feel so strongly about something that isn’t right?
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Brianna Wiest (The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery)
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I daydreamed about BEING Anne. Traipsing through nineteenth-century meadows, reciting Romantic poetry (Keats was my fave, because he died with such gruesome panache.) One day, I started creating my own original scenarios of Anne doing her plucky orphan thing. But I didn’t want to deal with the annoying stuff from old-timey days, like sexism and polio, so I moved up the timeline and transported her into modern life as a free-spirited teen heiress. I’d imagine Anne flying to Hong Kong on her private jet, or spying on Communists while she performed gymnastics for the US Olympic Team. Or simple things, like attending a new high school where she’d enter a classroom wearing designer jeans and everyone would gasp at how pretty she was. “Her hair is so long and red. Can I be her best friend immediately?
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Felicia Day (You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost))
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Check out KSpicer’s and LittleWalker’s YouTube channels – KSpicer and Littlewalker08plays, for gaming, gymnastics, toy reveals and super random friend challenges. One never knows what exciting videos are being uploaded next! LittleWalker can also be found under the Roblox username Child321654 – the same one in this book! Let her know if
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K. Spicer (Diary of a Roblox Hacker: Wrath of John Doe (Roblox Hacker Diaries Book 1))
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God is holy. A lot of people say that whatever you believe about God is fine, so long as you are sincere. But that is comparable to describing your friend in one instance as a three-hundred-pound sumo wrestler and in another as a five-foot-two, ninety-pound gymnast. No matter how sincere you are in your explanations, both descriptions of your friend simply cannot be true.
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Francis Chan (Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God)
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By the terms of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in June of last year legalizing the practice of destitute families selling their children, hoping they’d have a better life, or of rich families taking a famous downer as a trophy to impress their friends, I have no legal status if granted freedom. I would be “a non-person and vulnerable as a piece of furniture abandoned on a sidewalk,” as Justice William O. Washington said in his blistering dissent when the court announced its decision.
Spartak Jones, 16, the first legal slave since the Civil War
America’s top gymnast, handsome, poor, kidnapped and sold, contemplating his future
San Francisco in the year 2115
The Chronicles of Spartak—Rising Son, a novel
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Steven A. Coulter (Rising Son (The Chronicles of Spartak #1))
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Sometimes, You Just Need a Vibrator Coach Sommer introduced me to a Russian medical massage specialist who recommended I use the plug-in (not cordless) model of the Hitachi Magic Wand on its high setting. I’ve never experienced such heights of ecstasy. Thanks, Vladmir! Just kidding. In this case, it’s for relaxing hypertonic muscles (i.e., muscles that are tense even though they shouldn’t be). Just place the wand on your muscle belly (not insertion points) for 20 to 30 seconds, which is often all it takes at the proper hertz. Tension headaches or a stiff neck? It’s great for relaxing the occipitals at the base of the skull. Warning: Having Hitachi Magic Wands lying out around your house can go terribly wrong—or terribly right. Good luck explaining your “hypertonic muscles.” As one friend said to me, “I think my wife has that same problem. . . .” Gymnast Strong Unusual and Effective Bodyweight Exercises In less than eight weeks of following Coach Sommer’s protocols, I saw unbelievable improvement in areas I’d largely given up on. Try a few of my favorite exercises, and you’ll quickly realize that gymnasts use muscles you didn’t even know you had. QL Walk—An Unusual Warmup
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Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
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One German-American friend of mine, an architectural historian my own age, can be counted on to excoriate Woodrow Wilson after he has had several strong drinks. He goes on to say that it was Wilson who persuaded this country that it was patriotic to be stupid, to be proud of knowing only one language, of believing that all other cultures were inferior and ridiculous, offensive to God and common sense alike, that artists and teachers and studious persons in general were ninnies when it came to dealing with problems in life that really mattered, and on and on.
This friend says that it was a particular misfortune for this country that the German-Americans had achieved such eminence in the arts and education when it was their turn to be scorned from on high. To hate all they did and stood for at that time, which included gymnastics, by the way, was to lobotomize not only the German-Americans but our culture.
"That left American football," says my German-American friend, and someone is elected to drive him home.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage)
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So this is Paris, where my great-grandparents came from...the place that gave me my roots...and new friends!
My house has a thousand rooms...one for every place we've passed through!
My ceiling is sometimes a dome of stars...other times a fiery sunset...and still other times...the wild dance of storm clouds...
My time is that of the seasons...
My family speaks all languages...
But we don't have to open our mouths to understand each other. One look is enough...
We work together to create something that none of us alone would be able to. We mix our diversities with passion and what comes out is infinitely better than what is mine or yours...
Grandad Tenzin would say it's alchemy.
While it's true that I don't have a tiled roof, brick walls or a fixed address to write on an envelope...if you think about it I have much, much more...
Swimming pool with a view...
Gymnastics and acrobatic lessons every day...
Ethnic cuisines and nightly entertainment...
And day after day I can enjoy everything...without possessing anything!
I read somewhere --WHERE YOUR TREASURE LIES, THERE YOUR HEART WILL BE.
Well my heart lies with this big family of travelers...
They are my treasure!
That's why I can feel at home anywhere, though I have no home anywhere...
Deep down, wanderers are like flowing rivers..
which, with their twists and turns, are always looking for their own way to reach the sea...
If you think about it, isn't the same true of everyone? We may go along our separate ways , but our hearts must beat the world over!
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Tessa Radice
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I breathe out a few times to try to calm myself
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Melisa Torres (Nothing Better Than Gym Friends (Perfect Balance Gymnastics #2))