Maria Sharapova Quotes

You can’t control what people say about you and what they think about you. You can’t plan for bad luck. You can only work your hardest and do your best and tell the truth. In the end, it’s the effort that matters. The rest is beyond your control.

I hope people take away every kind of lesson, good and bad. This is a story about sacrifice, what you have to give up. But it’s also just the story of a girl and her father and their crazy adventure.

At the beginning, it’s all you have: a simple forehand, a simple backhand. It’s all you have at the end, too.

If you don't know where you come from, you don't know who you are.

Every loss teaches you something. The quicker you learn from the losses, then forget about the actual losing, the better off you will be. And do it fast!

I don't think it's for them to have an opinion, because they don't have the facts'.

I've always believed that you have to train harder than you play. That's how you win—so that the match, when it comes, comes as a kind of break. And you train, in this world, not for one match or for one tournament or for one season, but for an entire carreer, which will continue until they make you leave the last court on the final day.

Losing. I know what losing does to you. I’d learned its lessons on tennis courts all over the world. It knocks you down but also builds you up. It teaches you humility and gives you strength. It makes you aware of your flaws, which you then must do your best to correct. In this way, it can actually make you better. You become a survivor. You learn that losing is not the end of the world. You learn that the great players are not those who don’t get knocked down—everyone gets knocked down—they are those who get up just one more time than they’ve been knocked down. Losing is the teacher of every champion.

The player who keeps working five minute after everyone else has quit, who carries on late in the third set when the wind is blowing and the rain is coming down, wins.

Everyone wants to be with you when you win Grand Slams, but who will stick close when the whole world turns on you? That's the question.

Being ranked number one is not enough—I had to prove that I deserved to be ranked number one. I had to win that second Grand Slam.

Nothing makes you want somthing more than having it and losing it. Until I got that top ranking, I hadn't realized how much I'd wanted it. Now, more than anything, I wanted it back.

What sets the great players apart from the good players? The good players win when everything is working. The great players win even when nothing is working, even when the game is ugly; that is, when they are not great.

It can be hard to define home, especially when you have led a life as crazy and all over the place as mine, but you know it when you're there. It's where you feel most grounded, most understood, where you don't have to explain. It's where they get you. I am Russian. I have always known that, every minute of every day.

A tennis player at twenty-nine can seem like the oldest person in the world. She's been through an entire life span already, from youth to middle age to "get off the court, you're too damn old." A pro athetle really dies twice. At the end, like everyone else, but also at somewhere closer to the beginning, when she loses the only life she's ever known.

Winning a tennis match is a bit like receiving religious faith. You can't get there by work alone. You need grace, and you can't ever take it for granted.

I wanted to prove myself again and again and again. I wanted to beat them all. I was eighteen years old, the reigning Wimbledon champ, with nothing but time in front of me.

He was saying all the right things, and being encouraging and calm,

For being there for me during many challenging moments. For encouraging me when I was down. For pushing me, believing in me.

I remember just standing there, breathing it all in. Back on grass, back on grass. God, it felt so good, so much better than that fucking clay.

That was my gift. Not strength or speed. Stamina. I never got bored. Whatever I was doing, I could keep doing it forever. I liked it. I locked into each task, and stayed at it until I got it right.

To beat me, you had to break my serve, which did not break as easily as it had before. That's when I became dangeroud. That's when all those defeats turned into victories. At age fifteen, I began to win, and win consistently. My serve propelled me into a golden era, some of the best years of my career. But I would eventually pay a price for that serve and the tremendous pressure it put on my shoulder.

Maybe, in sports, you have to be dumb enough to believe you always have a chance. And a bad memory —you need that, too. You must be able to forget. You made an unforced error? You blew an easy winner? Don't dwell. Don't reply. Just forget, as if it never happened. If you tried something and it did not work, you have to be dumb enough, when the same chance comes around, to try it again. And this time it will work! You have to be dumb enough to have no fear. Every time I step on a court, I believe that I'm going to win, no matter who I'm playing or what does the odds say. That's what makes me so hard to beat.

The need to win, is less about the trophies than about beating the other girls. I can get fancy and sweet about it, but at bottom my motivation is simple: I want to beat everyone. It’s not just the winning. It’s the not being beaten. Ribbons and trophies get old, but losing lasts. I hate it. Fear of defeat is what really drives many of us. I say “us” because I can’t possibly be the only person who feels this way.

There were hard times, but, looking back, I can see that some of those hard times were the best times. It formed the bedrock, the basis for everything that would follow. It made me lonely, but it also made me independent and strong.

You do not have to be the best player in the world to win. You only have to be better, on that day, than the person across from you. And that’s something you understood from the start.” “You scared the shit out of the other girls,” he added. “Especially Jelena and Tatiana. You intimidated them. I don’t know whether you did it deliberately, but you had an air about you: this is a business and you are in my way.” * * * And then, just like that, I was kicked out of the academy. For Yuri, it was like being exiled from Eden, or slapped awake in the middle of a beautiful

What's defined my game more than anything? Determination, tenacity. I do not quit. Knock me down ten times, I get up the eleventh and shove that yellow ball right back at you. “This will not beat me,” I said. “This will not be the last word.” To understand my determination, you need to know who I am, where I come from, what happened. You need to know about me and my father and the flight from Russia in the dead of night when I was six. You need to know about Nick B. and Sekou and Serena and a nice old couple from Poland. You need to know the crazy story. In other words, you need to know everything.

I had never thought of my influence on other people before, how all the work I was doing might pave the way for the next generations, as others had paved the way for me. But I saw it now, and it inspired me. it made me happy and it awed me and of course it made me really want to get back out there and play my game. It's interesting. Before all this happened I was thinking only about the finish line. How it would end, how I would make my exit. But I don't think about that anymore. Now I only think about playing. As long as I can. as hard as I can. Until they take down the nets. Until they burn my rackets. Until they stop me. And I want to see them try.

Yuri sat on the couch to look at a stack of tennis magazines. He flipped through one at random. It fell open to the horoscope page. "Astrology Corner", he told me. "And it said, right there, in black and white, I swear, Maria, it said: 'The number one women's tennis player in the world will have the initials M.S. and she will be right-handed.

I was in the same place, in the same world, but I was not the same player and not the same person. I saw it all again with new eyes and truly appreciated it for the first time. It gave people a new way to understand my story. It's exciting when a kid wins on the biggest stage. That's new life, that's spring. But how much sweeter when a player who once had everything loses it al, and then, miraculously, gets it all back.

Tennis is not a game. It's a sport and a puzzle, an endurance test. You do whatever you can to win. it has been my enemy and my friend, my nightmare and the solace to that nightmare, my wound and the salve for my wound. Ask anyone who has made a life in this game, who has been out on the clay before they were old enough to understand the consequences of a strange early talent. I know you want us to love this game —us loving it makes it more fun to watch. But we don't love it. And we don't hate it. It just is, and always has been.

That's the thing about living life on the circuit, training from such an early age —you make a dozen different hotels and apartments and countries your home, which is another way of saying you kind of live nowhere. Everything drifts by. You never let yourself get too deep or have too much fun because you know that they day after tomorrow you'll be gone. Only the tennis rackets remain, always by your side. People think it's a glamorous life. And, in a way, it is —maybe it is. I am not convinced. it can also be confusing and lonely.

At some point toward the end of the 2016 Australian Open, a nurse asked me to pee in a cup. There was nothing unusual about this—it’s just another part of the procedure, performed by the ITF, the International Tennis Federation, to drug-test athletes and keep the sport clean. I was twenty-eight years old. I’d been peeing in those cups for more than a decade, and I forgot all about the test the moment after it happened, my mind quickly returning to the matter at hand: the next leg of the tour, the next match I’d have to win to get where I still needed to go.

If a man jumped as high as a louse (lice), he would jump over a football field. In Ancient Egypt, the average life expectancy was 19 years, but for those who survived childhood, the average life expectancy was 30 years for women and 34 years for men. The volume of the moon is equivalent to the volume of the water in the Pacific Ocean. After the 9/11 incident, the Queen of England authorized the guards to break their vow and sing America’s national anthem for Americans living in London. In 1985, lifeguards of New Orleans threw a pool party to celebrate zero drownings, however, a man drowned in that party. Men and women have different dreams. 70 percent of characters in men’s dreams are other men, whereas in women its 50 percent men and 50 percent women. Men also act more aggressively in dreams than women. A polar bear has a black skin. 2.84 percent of deaths are caused by intentional injuries (suicides, violence, war) while 3.15 percent are caused by diarrhea. On average people are more afraid of spiders than they are afraid of death. A bumblebee has hairs on its eyes, helping it collect the pollen. Mickey Mouse’s creator, Walt Disney feared mice. Citarum river in Indonesia is the dirtiest and most polluted river in the world. When George R R Martin saw Breaking Bad’s episode called “Ozymandias”, he called Walter White and said that he’d write up a character more monstrous than him. Maria Sharapova’s grunt is the loudest in the Tennis game and is often criticized for being a distraction. In Mandarin Chinese, the word for “kangaroo” translates literally to “bag rat”. The first product to have a barcode was a chewing gum Wrigley. Chambarakat dam in Iraq is considered the most dangerous dam in the world as it is built upon uneven base of gypsum that can cause more than 500,000 casualties, if broken. Matt Urban was an American Lieutenant Colonel who was nicknamed “The Ghost” by Germans because he always used to come back from wounds that would kill normal people.

It’s why a tennis player at twenty-nine can seem like the oldest person in the world. She’s been through an entire life span already, from youth to middle age to “get off the court, you’re too damn old.” A pro athlete really dies twice. At the end, like everyone else, but also at somewhere closer to the beginning, when she loses the only life she’s ever known.

They were from all over the world. Some were good. Some were very good. Some were great. But most were not good at all. These players, the ones who really made the academy profitable, were there because their parents could not face reality. Even the very good ones would never be good enough—even I could see that. In this world, the gap between very good and great is the Grand Canyon.

I want to beat everyone. It’s not just the winning. It’s the not being beaten. Ribbons and trophies get old, but losing lasts. I hate it. Fear of defeat is what really drives many of us. I say “us” because I can’t possibly be the only person who feels this way.