“We were stereotyped the way many athletes with disabilities or illnesses are, particularly in participatory sports such as biking, running, and triathlon. After a while I could pretty much fill in the thought balloons over these people's heads. "Oh, look at these heroic young people, courageously struggling to get themselves across the finish line, in order to raise money for thier cause. How inspiring!" Don't get me wrong; while we appreciate the good wishes and realized that they were usually genuine, something in that attitude rankled me, and still does. We're athletes, dammit, and we want to be accorded the same respect as other competitors. That's how you treat somebody with illness or disability, in my opinion. Not as a special-needs person, but as a person.”

“I smiled, though looking at William K caused me concern. He looked very ill, and he was my only mirror. We could not see ourselves so I relied on the appearance of the other boys, William K in particular, to know something of my own health. We ate the same food and were built in a similar way, so i watched him to see how thin i had become, how my eyes were growing more sunken. On this day i did not look good.”

“I was slightly brain damaged at birth, and I want people like me to see that they shouldn't let a disability get in the way. I want to raise awareness - I want to turn my disability into ability.”

“While we're living, we need to get over ourselves and accept others if we want to enchant people.”

“If we forever treat people like the person they were at their lowest, most despicable moments, how can we expect them not to believe that's who they are, and behave accordingly?”

“A long time ago I realized that, as psychiatrists, we had to have a healthy respect for our own humanness, and our own smallness in the face of what we were dealing with. If a person got better, we could appreciate that we had done a good job, but we also needed to realize that God – or luck – was on our side. If the person got worse and had to go to a state hospital, we had to keep ourselves from feeling that we hadn’t done enough. For the truth is, we were powerless in so many of these situations. We did what we could, but sometimes the illness was just bigger than we were.”