Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.

-Buck, Pearl ne¤  e Sydenstricker
  What  America Means To Me, ch.10.

Not a penny off the pay; not a second on the day.

-Cook, ArthurJames
  Miners'strike slogan, coined in a speech, 3  Apr. It is often rendered 'not a minute on the day'.

Cricket remains for me the game of games, the sanspareil, the great metaphor, the best marriage ever devisedof mind and body† For meit remainstheProust of pastimes, the subtlest and most poetic, the most past- and-present; whose beauty can lie equally in days, in a whole, or in one tiny phrase, a blinding split second.

-Fowles,John Robert
Quick Singles,'Vain Memories'. Quoted in Helen Exley Cricket Quotations (1992).

For here I leave my second leg, And the Forty-second Foot!

-Honorius of Autun
  'Faithless Nelly Gray'.

   Yes, we've had bad times at Anfield; one year we came second.

-Paisley, Bob
Quoted in Peter Ball and Phil Shaw The Book of Football Quotations (1989).

The flowers anew, returning seasons bring; But beauty faded has no second spring.

-Philips, Ambrose
  The First Pastoral,'Lobbin'.

I cannot remember anyone ever asking 'Who came second?'Can you?

-Reardon, Ray
Quoted in ColinJarmanThe Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

   One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washe'  d it away; Again I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tide, and made my pains his prey. 'Vain man,'said she,'that doest in vain assay A mortal thing so to immortalise, For I my self shall like to this decay, And eke my name be wipe'  d out likewise.' 'Not so,'quod I,'let baser things devise To die in dust, but you shall live by fame: My verse your virtues rare shall eternise, And in the heavens write your glorious name. Where when as death shall all the world subdue, Our love shall live, and later life renew.'

-Spenser, Edmund
  Amoretti, sonnet 75.

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say; Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

-Yeats,W(illiam) B(utler)
  'From Oedipus at Colonnus', stanza 4. Collected in The Tower (1928).