Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn't the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn't deserve my own pity.

I think all of us are intrigued to imagine what we as individuals would become, if we were ever tested as hard as that golden generation was.

We're often told that we live in a globalized world, and we talk about it all the time, but people don't stop to think about what it means.

We no longer need to show people being brave: instead, we can examine how they became brave. We can assume that they didn't start out that way. If we allow that they started out just like us, then their journey into courage becomes both more fascinating and more impressive.

We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

It's extremely hard for athletes to accept what's happened to them sometimes. It's hard to be beaten by a small margin, and I've spoken with athletes who, for years afterward, have been tormented by the knowledge that, had they done something ever so slightly different, they could have been one-ten-thousandth of a second quicker.

The only bad days as a writer are the ones when you are too cowardly or too lazy to sit down at the keyboard and give it everything you have.