"It's an abnormal world I live in...." - Quote by Arthur Ashe

“There were times when I asked myself whether I was being principled or simply a coward.... I was wrapped in the cocoon of tennis early in life, mainly by blacks like my most powerful mentor, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. They insisted that I be unfailingly polite on the court, unfalteringly calm and detached, so that whites could never accuse me of meanness. I learned well. I look at photographs of the skinny, frail, little black boy that I was in the early 1950s, and I see that I was my tennis racquet and my tennis racquet was me. It was my rod and my staff.”

“Start where you are, use what you have.”

“You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.”

“It's important to be self-aware about what people are saying about you, but even more so, be very aware of who you actually are, and to have that be the main priority.”

“I'm not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I've always been a freak. So I've been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I'm one of those people.”

“I am volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or voluptuous as a candle flame in gold.”

“If I were to start taking care of my grooming, I would no longer be my own self... so the hell with it... I will continue to be unconcerned about it, which surely has the advantage that I'm left in peace by many a fop who would otherwise come to see me.”

“The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward sensesare still truly adjusted to each other.”

“Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.”