All I want to tell young people is that you're not going to be anything in life unless you learn to commit to a goal. You have to reach deep within yourself to see if you are willing to make the sacrifices.

If you can take it, you can make it.

All I knew was that hate was so deadly as any poison and did no one any good. You had to control and eliminate it, if you could.

Yet a part of you still believes you can fight and survive no matter what your mind knows. It's not so strange. Where there's still life, there's still hope. What happens is up to God.

The world, we'd discovered, doesn't love you like your family loves you.

People say, on the raft, you must have hallucinated. Baloney. We were sharper after 47 days than the day we started because our minds were empty of all the war and contamination; we had clean minds to fill with good thoughts. Every day we'd exercise our minds.

I've always been called Lucky Louie. It's no mystery why.