Almost every magazine piece I've ever written, I felt like I haven't done it justice, like it was just a gloss.

The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.

I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong... to measure yourself at least once.

I'm going to paraphrase Thoreau here... rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness... give me truth.

Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence — the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes — all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.

Chris would use the spiritual aspect to try to motivate us. "He'd tell us to think about all the evil in the world, all the hatred, and imagine ourselves running against the forces of darkness, the evil wall that was trying to keep us from running our best. He believed that doing well was all mental, a simple matter of harnessing whatever energy was available.

At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.