I didn't want to skate for someone else or for certain marks.

I don't know how many people really knew who I was before the Olympics and that's the fun thing of the Olympics - you get to know someone who captures your heart, hopefully.

Every day, someone realizes a dream. I believe dreams help light our darkness and give us the push we need to move across the rink of life.

I'd try to channel my nervous energy in a positive way into strength and endurance. It didn't always work.

At 6 years old, the ice became a place for me to express myself. Because I was so shy off the ice, it became my safe haven, with music and freedom and self-expression. That was my emotional outlet.

I'm always looking for inspiring ways to stay motivated and stay active.

Once you have a child, your heart is forever outside your body. I totally understand that now.

Being an athlete, you know how to train and prepare your body for a performance and you're able to do it under pressure.

I never wanted to feel I hadn't worked hard enough.

As a teenager especially, I just wanted to do my thing and not be noticed.

I feel like I missed out on the regular high school social life, but that's the way I chose to be.

Claire coaxed free another loop of cloth. The slow side of cotton against cotton matched the soft tenor or her voice.'I have lots of talents Mr. Ryland. Listening is only one of them.

I've always had levity in my songs, so I like to turn things over, twist them around, and make fun of myself.

An artist works through exposed wounds.

Each day is a branch of the Tree of Life laden heavily with fruit. If we lie down lazily beneath it, we may starve; but if we shake the branches, some of the fruit will fall for us.

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.

Love must be learned and learned again; There is no end.

Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things that we do not see.

It's true that Eastern philosophy and religion were not unknown to me as a child, since my father has explored much in that area, and written books more or less in that area, too.

The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.

We completely deny the existence of a self-existent I, or a permanent, independent soul. Every aspect of your body and mind is impermanent: changing, changing, changing.