Top 60 Daniel James Brown Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “So is life: the very problems you must overcome also support you and make you stronger in overcoming them. – George Yeoman Pocock.”

— Daniel James Brown

2. “George Pocock learned much about the hearts and souls of young men. He learned to see hope where a boy thought there was no hope, to see skill where skill was obscured by ego or by anxiety. He observed the fragility of confidence and the redemptive power of trust.”

— Daniel James Brown

3. “Great crews may have men or women of exceptional talent or strength; they may have outstanding coxswains or stroke oars or bowmen; but they have no stars. The team effort – the perfectly synchronized flow of muscle, oars, boat, and water; the single, whole, unified, and beautiful symphony that a crew in motion becomes – is all that matters. Not the individual, not the self.”

— Daniel James Brown

4. “Every one of them believed he was simply lucky to be rowing in the boat, that he didn’t really measure up to the obvious greatness of the other boys, and that he might fail the others at any moment. Every one of them was fiercely determined not to let that happen.”

— Daniel James Brown

5. “Death was the rule, life the exception. Life was at best a transitory dream, set in a universe that was entirely indifferent to his fate.”

— Daniel James Brown

6. “It’s a great art, is rowing. It’s the finest art there is. It’s a symphony of motion. And when you’re rowing well, why it’s nearing perfection. And when you near perfection, you’re touching the Divine. It touches the you of yous. Which is your soul.”

— Daniel James Brown

7. “Harmony, balance, and rhythm. They’re the three things that stay with you your whole life. Without them civilization is out of whack. And that’s why an oarsman, when he goes out in life, he can fight it, he can handle life. That’s what he gets from rowing.”

— Daniel James Brown

8. “The only time you don’t find a four-leaf clover,” he liked to say, “is when you stop looking for one.”

— Daniel James Brown

9. “It isn’t enough for the muscles of a crew to work in unison; their hearts and minds must also be as one. – George Yeoman Pocock.”

— Daniel James Brown

10. “It takes energy to get angry. It eats you up inside. I can’t waste my energy like that and expect to get ahead.”

— Daniel James Brown

11. “A fact is not a truth until you love it. – John Keats.”

— Daniel James Brown

12. “Physiologists, in fact, have calculated that rowing a two-thousand-meter race – the Olympic standard – takes the same physiological toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back. And it exacts that toll in about six minutes.”

— Daniel James Brown

13. “Rowing a race is an art, not a frantic scramble. It must be rowed with head power as well as hand power. From the first stroke all thoughts of the other crew must be blocked out. Your thoughts must be directed to you and your own boat, always positive, never negative.”

— Daniel James Brown

14. “He suggested that Joe think of a well-rowed race as a symphony, and himself as just one player in the orchestra. If one fellow in an orchestra was playing out of tune, or playing at a different tempo, the whole piece would naturally be ruined. That’s the way it was with rowing. What mattered more than how hard a man rowed was how well everything he did in the boat harmonized with what the other fellows were doing.”

— Daniel James Brown

15. “If you simply kept your eyes open, it seemed, you just might find something valuable in the most unlikely of places. The trick was to recognize a good thing when you saw it, no matter how odd or worthless it might at first appear, no matter who else might just walk away and leave it behind.”

— Daniel James Brown

16. “Sure, I can make a boat,” he said, and then added, quoting the poet Joyce Kilmer, “’But only God can make a tree.”

— Daniel James Brown

17. “When Al Ulbrickson arrived on the float, he crouched down next to the boat and, with a cryptic smile, quietly said, “Well done, boys.” Joe had never heard his coach speak in quite that tone of voice. There seemed to be a hint of hushed respect in it. Almost deference.”

— Daniel James Brown

18. “And when you near perfection, you’re touching the Divine. It touches the you of yous.”

— Daniel James Brown

19. “Men as fit as you, when your everyday strength is gone, can draw on a mysterious reservoir of power far greater. Then it is that you can reach for the stars. That is the way champions are made. – George Yeoman Pocock O.”

— Daniel James Brown

20. “They emblazoned the cotton with the words “California Republic.” Above that they drew a star and what they intended to be the figure of a grizzly bear. Then they ran the flag up the pole. The Mexican Californians who had gathered around, suddenly foreigners in their own land, looked up, pondered it silently, and wondered why the Americans had chosen a pig as the symbol of their ascension to power. The.”

— Daniel James Brown

21. “The brutal afternoon workouts left him exhausted and sore but feeling cleansed, as if someone had scrubbed out his soul with a stiff wire brush.”

— Daniel James Brown

22. “Good crews are good blends of personalities: someone to lead the charge, someone to hold something in reserve; someone to pick a fight, someone to make peace; someone to think things through, someone to charge ahead without thinking.”

— Daniel James Brown

23. “The common denominator in all these conditions – whether in the lungs, the muscles, or the bones – is overwhelming pain. And that is perhaps the first and most fundamental thing that all novice oarsmen must learn about competitive rowing in the upper echelons of the sport: that pain is part and parcel of the deal. It’s not a question of whether you will hurt, or of how much you will hurt; it’s a question of what you will do, and how well you will do it, while pain has her wanton way with you.”

— Daniel James Brown

24. “I just don’t understand why you don’t get angry.” Joe continued to stare ahead through the windshield. “It takes energy to get angry. It eats you up inside. I can’t waste my energy like that and expect to get ahead. When they left, it took everything I had in me just to survive. Now I have to stay focused. I’ve just gotta take care of it myself.”

— Daniel James Brown

25. “When all is said and done I think the story tells us that hope is the heroes domain, not the fools. Because we dare to hope, even when doing so might undo us. We leave the worlds we create behind us, swirling in our wakes, eternal and effervescent with the beauty of our aspirations.”

— Daniel James Brown

26. “Look, son, if there’s one thing I’ve figured out about life, it’s that if you want to be happy, you have to learn to be happy on your own.”

— Daniel James Brown

27. “It wasn’t just the rowing but his crewmates that he had to give himself up to, even if it meant getting his feelings hurt. Pocock paused and looked up at Joe. “If you don’t like some fellow in the boat, Joe, you have to learn to like him. It has to matter to you whether he wins the race, not just whether you do.”

— Daniel James Brown

28. “On November 15, Will Rogers neatly and characteristically summed up the American attitude toward the prospect of a second French-German conflict with a simple, homespun image. The United States, he said, ought to “just let those two old tomcats whose tails are tied together over the fence alone and try to cure the scratches we got the last time we tried to untie ’em.”

— Daniel James Brown

29. “One of the first admonitions of a good rowing coach, after the fundamentals are over, is “pull your own weight,” and the young oarsman does just that when he finds out that the boat goes better when he does. There is certainly a social implication here. – George Yeoman Pocock.”

— Daniel James Brown

30. “A good shell has to have life and resiliency to get in harmony with the swing of the crew.”

— Daniel James Brown

31. “Every good rowing coach, in his own way, imparts to his men the kind of self-discipline required to achieve the ultimate from mind, heart, and body. Which is why most ex-oarsmen will tell you they learned more fundamentally important lessons in the racing shell than in the classroom.”

— Daniel James Brown

32. “It reminds us that as ordinary as we might be, we can, if we choose, take the harder road, walk forth bravely under the indifferent stars. We can hazard the ravages of chance. We can choose to endure what seems unendurable, and thereby open up the possibility of prevailing. We can awaken to the world as it is, and, seeing it with eyes wide open, we can nevertheless embrace hope rather than despair.”

— Daniel James Brown

33. “The challenges they had faced together had taught them humility – the need to subsume their individual egos for the sake of the boat as a whole – and humility was the common gateway through which they were able now to come together and begin to do what they had not been able to do before.”

— Daniel James Brown

34. “It was a shared experience – a singular thing that had unfolded in a golden sliver of time long gone, when nine good-hearted young men strove together, pulled together as one, gave everything they had for one another, bound together forever by pride and respect and love.”

— Daniel James Brown

35. “In the fireplace, nestled among the ashes, a large cast-iron Dutch oven stood always at the ready. It was a vessel from which Sarah had likely served and eaten a thousand meals. For as long as she could remember, it had served for uses as varied as stewing venison, baking salt-rising bread, and soaking her father’s frostbitten feet on winter nights.”

— Daniel James Brown

36. “Sharman Apt Russell, author of Hunger: An Unnatural History.”

— Daniel James Brown

37. “Every one of them had come from humble origins or been humbled by the ravages of the hard times in which they had grown up. Each in his own way, they had all learned that nothing could be taken for granted in life, that for all their strength and good looks and youth, forces were at work in the world that were greater than they.”

— Daniel James Brown

38. “The trick was to recognize a good thing when you saw it, no matter how odd or worthless it might at first appear, no matter who else might just walk away and leave it behind.”

— Daniel James Brown

39. “To appreciate beauty is to experience humility – to recognize that something larger and more powerful than oneself is at work in the environment. And humility, it turns out, is key to recognizing that in order to survive, you must adapt yourself to the environment, that it won’t adapt to your needs.”

— Daniel James Brown

40. “Now it came as a searing revelation that his father had not felt safe enough to live by that same simple proposition, that he had kept his heritage hidden painfully away, a secret to be ashamed of, even in America, even from his own beloved son.”

— Daniel James Brown

41. “Feeling trapped, growing desperate, she finally declared that she would not live under the same roof with Joe, that it was him or her, that Joe had to move out if she were to stay in such a godforsaken place. Harry could not calm her down, and he could not abide the thought of losing a second wife, certainly not one as lovely as Thula. He went back upstairs and told his son he would have to move out of the house. Joe was ten.”

— Daniel James Brown

42. “Others dangled cigarettes from their lips, and as they paged through the day’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer they could take satisfaction in a half-page ad that trumpeted the latest proof of the health benefits of smoking: “21 of 23 Giants World’s Champions Smoke Camels. It Takes Healthy Nerves to Win the World Series.”

— Daniel James Brown

43. “You had to master your opponent mentally. When the critical moment in a close race was upon you, you had to know something he did not – that down in your core you still had something in reserve, something you had not yet shown, something that once revealed would make him doubt himself, make him falter just when it counted the most. Like so much in life, crew was partly about confidence, partly about knowing your own heart.”

— Daniel James Brown

44. “Finally, as Joe pulled over to the curb to drop her off at the judge’s home, Joyce erupted. She demanded to know why Joe let his parents treat him as they did. Why did he go on pretending that they hadn’t done him any harm? What kind of woman would leave a boy alone in the world? What kind of father would let her do that? Why didn’t he ever get angry at them? Why didn’t he just demand that they let him see his half siblings? She was nearly sobbing by the time she finished.”

— Daniel James Brown

45. “Blue dragonflies hovered overhead, their wings rattling dryly.”

— Daniel James Brown

46. “Before all was said and done, she would, in fact, become the woman in Germany who more than any other would materially shape the destiny of the Nazi movement. Leni Riefenstahl was beautiful and brilliant. She knew what she wanted and how to get it. And what she wanted above all was to be at the center of things, in the spotlight, basking in applause.”

— Daniel James Brown

47. “They are almost all gone now – the legions of young men who saved the world in the years just before I was born. But that afternoon, standing on the balcony of Haus West, I was swept with gratitude for their goodness and their grace, their humility and their honor, their simple civility and all the things they taught us before they flitted across the evening water and finally vanished into the night.”

— Daniel James Brown

48. “Perhaps the seeds of redemption lay not just in perseverance, hard work, and rugged individualism. Perhaps they lay in something more fundamental – the simple notion of everyone pitching in and pulling together.”

— Daniel James Brown

49. “The result of all this muscular effort, on both the larger scale and the smaller, is that your body burns calories and consumes oxygen at a rate that is unmatched in almost any other human endeavor. Physiologists, in fact, have calculated that rowing a two-thousand-meter race – the Olympic standard – takes the same physiological toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back. And it exacts that toll in about six minutes.”

— Daniel James Brown

50. “Johnny was the apple of his eye, and he wanted more than anything for his son to become an oarsman. Johnny, in turn, wanted nothing more than to meet his father’s often very high expectations, whatever they might be. And Johnny hadn’t let him down so far. He was unusually bright, accomplished, and ambitious, and he had graduated.”

— Daniel James Brown