You would be surprised what two hours of daily exercise and five hundred stomach crunches can do for you.

There is a time to study a map passionately, obsessively. To see where you've gone, where others have gone before you. To commit to memory every obstacle, every danger. Shakespeare had a term for this obsession: mappery. But there is a time, too, when you say, come dragons. I challenge you to find me.

Maybe we don't have the same definition of about what's beautiful. So define it. Define true beauty.

If there was one thing I refused to be, it was an insignificant footnote in some boy's history.

Like world describers before me, those mapmakers in the seventeenth centure, I had laid down my first faintly drawn border. With that one tentative mark, my world expanded by a few freeing degrees.

To dream is to starve doubt, feed hope.

My confidence was of the hothouse variety, carefully cultivated under highly regulated conditions. One wrong look, one mean comment, and my facade would wither.