“If youre smart, you care. And if you care, you love.”

“But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.”

“It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.”

“But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing.”

“on the day that started it all, that rocketed me forward and landed me here, in this new body, in this new future.”

“Once you let in the word, once you allow it to take root, it will spread like a mold through all of your corners and dark spaces and with it, the questions, the shivery, splintered fears, enough to...”

“My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense t...”

“Everything has been created twice once on a mental plain and once on a physical plain.”

“Fitness, defending, the mental stuff - those were all weaknesses of mine. And I turned those into strengths.”

“The thoughts that occur to me while Im running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guest...”

“Running cleared the day's cobwebs from my mind and focused my thinking, and gave me time and space to sort out anything that was bothering me, or to detach and think of nothing at all.”

“When Douglas walked, his mind ran, when he ran, his mind walked.”

“Parenting is no sport for perfectionists.”

“It is naive to think that sport is above politics, that any kind of level playing field exists, or that sport allows the world to put its problems on hold.”

“Football combines the two worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”