Quotes from John Kessel

Coaches must be flexible, for then they won't get bent out of shape.

Coaches need to have the ability of tact - to teach the team to rub out mistakes rather than to rub them in.

The kind of player who has turned his game around, he used to be lousy and lazy and now he is lazy and lousy.

The meaning of volleyball, is to give meaning to volleyball, as the meaning of coaching is to give meaning to coaching.

You must allow your players to become the athletes they can be. Don't make them into anything just to become the kind of winners fans, friends and others think they must be.

False teammates are like our shadows. They keep close to us when we are all walking in the sunshine, but they are gone the instant we just go into the shade, let alone the darkness.

Players need you to care, especially when they do not deserve it.

Kafka is not interested in documenting the manners and mores of any particular place; he is not interested in probing the psyche of individual characters.

Kafka's inevitable tropism for the allegorical puts him in marked opposition to the realism that dominated the literary world of the first half of the 20th century.

I don't know if this is a stumbling block, but I had a real setback when I won a Nebula Award for the first story I ever had nominated for a Nebula in 1982. And you might think that was a good thing - and it was a wonderful thing, I don't regret it a bit. But I was sort of discombobulated by it.

Most volleyball players are made in the winter, spring and summer, for come fall, everyone practices equal time.

One of the influences of Kafka over later writers is not so much in the content of his work as in its form.

Since my first encounter with Kafka's writing, I've been interested in a quality that, while he was alive, stood in the way of his achieving a large reputation: his allegory.

Work hard - beat out half the team. Be committed, play fair as a team player - Beat out another quarter of the team. The last quarter is your desire and beliefs, and where you are playing.

There is no such thing as 'staying in shape;' you either work to get better, or you allow yourself to get worse.

But that was the nature of love: one did not offer it with any assurance that it would change the world, even if in the end it was the only thing that could.

At the same time King David had told how God's truth was written in nature for men to read, he had also begged to be kept free from 'the great transgression': doing wrong when one believes one is doing right. How easy, when one followed the promptings of the traitorous heart, to convince oneself that pure selfishness is the ultimate selflessness, that desire is fate, that murder is self-sacrifice.