“When life takes away, something of greater value is always given in return.”

“When prescribing one of the drugs I take, my doctor warned me of a common side effect: exaggerated, intensely vivid dreams. To be honest, I've never really noticed the difference. I've always dreamt big.”

“If you don't take the time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”

“I owned a Ferrari, a Range Rover, a Mercedes 560SL convertible, a Jeep Cherokee and a Nissan 300ZX. I can't remember the intricate decision tree I had to climb in order to determine which one to drive to work on any given day - it probably had something to do with the weather, or which car had more gas in the tank, or upholstery that best matched whatever shirt I happened to throw on that morning.”

“The purpose that you wish to find in life, like a cure you seek, is not going to fall from the sky. ...I believe purpose is something for which one is responsible; it's not just divinely assigned.”

“When describing me, Tracy often refers to a well-known concept of physics: 'inertia.' As Newton avers in his first law: 'An object that is not moving will not move until a force acts upon it. An object that is moving will not change its velocity until a net force acts upon it.' In other words, depending on what's happening in my life at any given moment, I can either be the laziest human being on the planet, or the busiest. I'm perfectly content to do absolutely nothing until I'm catalyzed by some person or project, and then I go nonstop until some countervailing force acts upon me, and I revert back to static mode.”

“If you were to rush into this room right now and announce that you had struck a deal - with God, Allah, Buddha, Christ, Krishna, Bill Gates, whomever - in which the ten years since my diagnosis could be magically taken away, traded in for ten more years as the person I was before - I would, without a moment's hesitation, tell you to take a hike.”