Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's not about breaking down borders. It's about pushing off of them, and seeing what amazing places they might bring us.
My motivation is not to try to inspire, but rather to do things that inspire me and hopefully that will spread to others.
We live as if we know how everything will turn out. I certainly lived that way. But we don't know anything. Really, we don't.
I always say snowboarding saved my life. It gave me a reason to focus on the future; it gave me something to be passionate about.
Dancers know how to move their arms and their hands. But I don't know the first thing about how to move my arms and hands gracefully.
I was on my death bed, and I remember hanging on to these words, 'Don't be scared. You are going to live an amazing life,' and I have.
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.
When disease took my legs, I eventually realized I didn't need them to lead a full, empowering life; Only True Disability Is in Our Mind.
Road trips to me are just such an escape. You listen to your music, and you roll the windows down. You're usually going to somewhere fun.
That's really what the Paralympics is about: these amazing athletes and this technology that's allowing them to reach their full potential.
Just the thought of being on Oprah's radar at all is humbling, but to actually have her take time get on the phone with me kind of blows my mind.
Of course, I was 19 years old, and I suddenly lost my legs. It was extremely traumatic at the time, but I'm so beyond that. I've done so much with my life.
The thing with prosthetic feet is you can't have all this crazy motion, or you'd be all over the place - because it's mechanical, and it's outside your body.
Of course, there are benefits to having prosthetics. I can make myself as tall as I want. I can wear flip-flops in the snow if I wanted to. There's benefits.
It's when I compare myself to what other people are able to do that I run into trouble. It is a bummer. I just constantly try to put things into perspective.
Oprah has been a true inspiration to me, so I'm truly grateful both to her for taking the time to speak with me, and to the folks at 'DWTS' who set it all up.
Just because I've got two prosthetic legs, yeah, I had to adapt in ways, but I've also become a lot stronger. It doesn't mean I'm at any disadvantage, really.
To be able to walk down the street and have people stop you, not just because they recognize you, but because you somehow personally touched them, it's amazing.
I feel that losing both my legs was a blessing. It was meant to happen to me: I wouldn't have had the opportunity to touch so many lives in such a positive way.
My dad had given my sister and I our starter car, a red, old 1985 Chevy Blazer. It was so beat up, the taillights would fall off, and we would use red duct tape.
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.
I knew what I didn't want. I didn't want people to feel sorry for me. I didn't want people to see me as disabled. I wanted to live a life of adventure and stories.
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.
Yes, there are things that I can't change, but the things I can, I'm going to do everything in my power to work very hard through them and come out stronger on the other side.
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 made a choice before I lost my legs that I was going to live the best life possible and that I wasn't going to let this slow me down - and that choice has kept me moving forward.
For me, I just began, eventually, to embrace what I had. This is what I have to deal with and, not just deal with, but this is what I have to share, and how can I do that the best way.
When you are truly you and share who you are with the world and be confident in who you are, it doesn't matter what size you are. It doesn't matter what your different body parts look like.
I grew up born and raised in Las Vegas and actually grew up skiing. You know, we've got some ski resorts close to Las Vegas, up in Mount Charleston or Brian Head, so I grew up skiing and snowboarding.
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.
I have two prosthetic legs. This is my life; what am I going to do with it? And it's put me on this amazing journey. I can look back and be completely grateful and say I would never want to change anything.
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.
Growing up in the hot Last Vegas desert, all I wanted was to be free. I would daydream about traveling the world, living in a place where it snowed, and I would picture all of the stories that I would go on to tell.
After I lost my legs, I got invited to my old high school, and I shared my stories with all the classes. I remember I was so nervous and didn't know where to start, but I knew I had information they could take away.
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.
That's the problem with bacterial meningitis: it progresses really fast. You think you have the flu, and they say within 15 hours it's severely deadly - for sure within the first 24 hours - but even the first 15 hours.
I kind of had to figure stuff out on my own and get myself snowboarding competitively again. I went through all types of different legs to try to learn which were going to work for me. Luckily, I was able to figure it out.
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.
Instead of looking at our challenges and limitations as something negative or bad, we can begin to look at them as blessings, magnificent gifts that can be used to ignite our imaginations and help us go further than we ever knew we could go.
Pfizer's actually teamed up with my nonprofit organization, which is called Adaptive Action Sports. I cofounded this organization in 2005 to help people with physical disabilities get involved in action sports, go snowboarding, skateboarding.
The human foot has bones and muscles and can balance back and forth. If you step and you maybe make a little mistake, your foot can compensate. But if I step in the wrong spot, my foot isn't going to compensate because it's just one piece of carbon fiber.
In snowboarding, I've always looked at really strong competitors through a lens of gratitude rather than envy in the sense that the better my competition is, the more it forces me to work hard, focus, and be better myself if I want to succeed, which I do.
I was 19 years old, and I felt like I had the flu one day. Within 24 hours, I was in the hospital on life support, and I was given less than a 2 percent chance of living. It took five days for the doctors to find out that I had contracted bacterial meningitis.
If somebody would've told me that I was going to lose my legs at the age of 19, I would've thought there's absolutely no way I'd be able to handle that. But then it happened, and I realized that there's so much more to live for, that my life isn't about my legs.
I tried snowboarding at 14, and I absolutely fell in love with it. I snowboarded every day off I had, every weekend I had off of school, every holiday we had off from school, and it became a huge part of my life, not just what I love to do, but really just kind of who I was.
We can either see our circumstances as a set of random cruelties and then allow those hardships to turn us into bitter victims; or we can recognize the fact that, though we may never comprehend why hard things happen, they do, and when they do, we can reach for a larger purpose beyond the pain.
In my dreams, whatever I am doing, I look down to see if I have prosthetics. It sets my time frame in my dream, I think. I'd have these dreams that I am running and launching myself, and I look down and see that I have prosthetics. I have a lot of those, where I do great, amazing things with my prosthetics.
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.
After I lost my legs, all I wanted to do was snowboard again. I remember spending an entire year on the computer, looking for 'adaptive snowboarders' or 'snowboard legs' or 'adaptive snowboard schools' or just something that I could connect to. I already knew how to snowboard - I just needed to find the right legs.
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.