Art & Creativity Quote by Major Taylor

There is a quiet flex in Major Taylor’s restraint. He’s pointing at the temptation to argue his case endlessly, then refusing it. For an athlete who spent his career being doubted, policed, and flat-out barred because he was a Black man winning in a white sport, “I might go on” reads like code for: you wouldn’t listen anyway. So he pivots to the one thing the era couldn’t easily dismiss as “opinion” or “attitude” - the ledger of lived results.

The phrase “book of experiences” does double duty. It’s literal (Taylor did publish an autobiography) and rhetorical: he’s positioning his life as evidence, not grievance. That matters in a time when Black excellence was routinely met with demands for extra proof, extra politeness, extra humility. Taylor offers all three, but with a steel spine. The clause “after all is said, done, and written” stacks speech, action, and record-keeping into a single hierarchy: talk is cheap; survival is expensive; documentation is power.

Then he underplays the victory: “overcome them to some extent.” That’s not false modesty so much as an honest accounting of structural limits. Taylor can win races and still be shut out of hotels, threatened by competitors, and forced overseas to compete. The intent isn’t to inspire with a tidy triumph. It’s to insist that obstacles weren’t personal quirks to be “worked through” - they were systems. His most radical move is making his perseverance legible without begging for sympathy.