Amy Purdy

“I've never wanted sympathy votes in anything I do in my life.”

“I'm an athlete, yes, but I'm also a woman. I'm someone who kind of, in a way, lost touch with that part of myself after I lost my legs, because there are certain feminine traits you lose when you have prosthetic legs.”

“What's cool is that Oprah is the same person on stage and in front of a camera as she is off stage and behind the scenes. She speaks the same way on camera as she does off camera.”

“I'm a big oatmeal fan. For my every-morning breakfast, I will do oatmeal with cinnamon, goat's milk or even butter, with apples and raisins, and then I'll maybe do some eggs, say two poached eggs with that.”

“A lot of times, people think 'para' as far as 'paralyzed.' 'Para' means 'alongside,' so the Paralympics are alongside the Olympics on the same courses, the same hills.”

“There are plenty of people who have legs who are way more disabled than me.”

“If your life were a book and you were the author, how would you want your story to go? That's the question that changed my life forever.”

“We did everything we could to save my legs, and it just came to a point where if we didn't amputate my legs, I wouldn't survive. In that situation, you kind of go into survival mode, and you find strength.”

“As humans, we need to reach out for support.”

“I have a very good sense of my body and where it's at. Although I don't feel the ground in the same way that somebody else would, I'm very aware... I can feel pressure, and I know exactly where my toes are and exactly where my heel is.”

“At the age of 19, the day after I graduated high school, I moved to a place where it snowed, and I became a massage therapist. With this job, all I needed were my hands and my massage table by my side and I could go anywhere. For the first time in my life, I felt free, independent, and completely in control of my life.”

“I guess I'm always up for a challenge.”

“For me, a bad day is when I have nothing going on.”

“I don't want to see myself as this sad, disabled girl. I know that. I don't want other people to see me as that, either.”

“My spleen burst. I remember feeling my heart beating really fast. Beating right out of my chest.”

“If you want something bad enough and you work hard enough, anything's possible.”

“You can't even imagine the feeling you get when someone tells you that you are about to lose your legs.”

“I love the smell of rain, and I love the sound of the ocean waves.”

“I lost the life that I knew, and I really had to rethink my future and think about my core values and the things that I love, and my passion, and that's really what helped me move forward. Also, for me just being grateful for what I had in my life versus on focusing on what I was losing, that really helped as well.”

“We've all seen that every challenge we've gone through, we've learned something from. It's not getting hung up on the challenges but figuring out how to get ahead.”