Running & Being: The Total Experience by George Sheehan
| filed under: Book Review, Runner, Review, Reviews, Running, Book, Book ReviewsSo inspiring... To get me back onto the road
Running & Being: The Total Experience by George Sheehan is so inspiring... To get me back onto the road I'm looking for both spiritual and physical motivation to take the next half of my life by the horns, especially by getting back onto the road, running. I used to be a four-mile daily runner with eight mile weekends. Sheehan was recommended to me as a prophet. That he is indeed.
QUOTES CHRIS LIKED
“Writing, someone said, is turning blood into ink.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
“The trouble with this country,” the late John Berryman once told fellow poet James Dickey, “is that a man can live his entire life without knowing whether or not he is a coward.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
“There were a lot of people in the service,” says Dickey, “who cried when they were discharged because they knew they would have to go back to driving taxicabs and working in insurance offices.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
“Courage, then, has nothing to do with a single act of bravery. Courage is how one lives, not one specific incident. Just as mortal sin is a lifestyle, not one startling transgression. Some,”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
“When I was young, I was afflicted with what my aunt called “convenient deafness.” I still am. I have the ability to tune out what is going on around me. It is normal for me to retreat inside myself and become less and less aware of my surroundings. If I am in a group and not talking, do not suppose I am listening. I am “away.” I am off in another world. Off in my natural habitat, my mind. Being”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
“Buying food never did make sense to me. When I finally spend some money I prefer to have some permanent evidence of the expenditure. Doing it on something that is immediately consumed leaves me feeling cheated. For much the same reason, I suppose, I have never smoked. Buying something and then setting it on fire is incomprehensible. So”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
“Becoming an ex-alcoholic, however, is not easy. Drink may be futile and ultimately degrading, but only the fortunate drinker discovers this. And it is the even more fortunate one who then comes upon a new and healthy path to the summit of his physical and mental powers. Before the liver goes, the heart enlarges and the brain begins to deteriorate, he must get the message that there is a better way to experience himself and the universe. My”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
“If you think that life has passed you by, or, even worse, that you are living someone else’s life, you can still prove the experts wrong. T”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
“Tomorrow can be the first day of the rest of your life. All you have to do is to follow Thoreau. Inhabit your body with delight, with inexpressible satisfaction; both its weariness and its refreshments. And”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
“I myself am my only obstacle to perfection,” wrote Kierkegaard.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
“The athlete doesn’t stop smoking and start training. He starts training and finds he has stopped smoking.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
“I am an intellectual. This does not mean I am intelligent, but that ideas are more important to me than people.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
“Anyone with a sense of humor can see that life is a joke, not a tragedy.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
“The first half hour of my run is for my body. The last half hour, for my soul. In the beginning the road is a miracle of solitude and escape. In the end it is a miracle of discovery and joy. Throughout, it brings an understanding of what Blake meant when he said, “Energy is eternal delight.” I”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
“Thomas Merton, another solitary, understood that. The beginning of freedom, he wrote, is not liberation from the body but liberation from the mind. We are not entangled in our own body, we are entangled in our mind. I”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
“The runner need not break four minutes in the mile or four hours in the marathon. It is only necessary that he runs and runs and sometimes suffers. Then one day he will wake up and discover that somewhere along the way he has begun to see order and law and love and Truth that makes men free. It”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience