“No one wakes up in the morning and says, 'I want to gain 150 pounds and I will start right now!”

“The individual who says it is not possible should move out of the way of those doing it.”

“Inspiration is external and motivation is internal. It is up to me to provide the switch and you to flip it on!”

“I remember one morning getting up at dawn. There was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling. And I... I remember thinking to myself: So this is the beginning of happiness, this is where it starts. And of course there will always be more...never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment, right then.”

“What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted something alive and shocking enough that it could be a morning in somebody's life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that.”

“She was drowning—in friendliness, in community—and she was starting to think she didn't want to get pulled out.”

“Now do you understand why I'm interested in you? You're a locked door, sweetheart. You give no one a key and you never answer the door when anyone knocks...Ah, but sometimes, sometimes I get a peek through the keyhole and what I find there...It's like glimpsing you as you're stripping. Underneath all of that darkness is something hungry, something desperate, something, oh, so deliciously vulnerable.”