Best Quotes from It's Not About The Bike by Armstrong Lance With Jenkins Sally with Page Numbers

Death is not exactly cocktail-party conversation, I know, and neither is cancer, or brain surgery, or matters below the waist.

I'm not here to make polite conversation. I want to tell the truth.

Some of it is not easy to tell or comfortable to hear.

Good, strong people get cancer, and they do all the right things to beat it, and they still die.

If I live, who is it that I intend to be?

There are two Lance Armstrongs, pre-cancer, and post.

The real question is how didn't it change me?

The truth is that cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me.

People live, and in the most remarkable ways.

What do I have to do? I asked. 'Let's get on with it. Let's kill this stuff.'

"Make every obstacle an opportunity."

"I was wanted. My mother was so determined to have me that she hid her pregnancy by wearing baby-doll shirts so that no one would interfere or try to argue her out of it."

"Nothing goes to waste, you put it all to use, the old wounds and long-ago slights become the stuff of competitive energy."

"If it was a suffer-fest, I was good at it."

"Son, you never quit."

"I could only hope to have the stamina and fortitude of my mother, a single woman with a young son and a small salary."

"I learned to love Texas on those rides. The countryside was beautiful, in a desolate kind of way."

"If you can't give 110 percent, you won't make it."

"I was discovering that if it was a matter of gritting my teeth, not caring how it looked, and outlasting everybody else, I won."

"I promised myself I would never quit, and I would never give up."

"You weren't afraid to fail."

"If you had known what you were doing and conserved your energy, you'd have been in the medals."

"You can do a lot better."

"It's a bike race—he's riding to win."

"If you feel like you can win the race, you do it."

"Don't let anybody intimidate you—you put your head down, and you race."

"I don't check my mother at the door."

"I was learning a cycling tradition: the discomfort of the sport extends to the accommodations."

"You don't win a road race all on your own. You need your teammates—and you need the goodwill and cooperation of your competitors, too."

"The Tour is not just a bike race, not at all. It is a test."

Real fear came with an unmistakable sensation: it was as though all my blood started flowing in the wrong direction.

Everything now stacked up differently: the anxieties of life— a flat tire, losing my career, a traffic jam—were reprioritized into need versus want.

It's natural for you to cry... Lance, this is curable. It's a speed bump. We need to get on with whipping this thing.

I'm going to beat this thing, whatever it is.

This isn't going to get us. We've had too many things to deal with. This is one thing that won't happen. Don't even try this with me.

You have no idea what this means, or what's going to happen.

Knowledge was more reassuring than ignorance: at least I knew what I was dealing with.

The idea was oddly restorative: winning my life back would be the biggest victory.

I wanted to live, but whether I would or not was a mystery.

This disease would force me to ask more of myself as a person than I ever had before.

When you looked around for a body to try to live in, you made a big mistake when you chose mine.

If the deal is that I never cycle again, but I get to live, I'll take it, I thought.

We're practically going to have to teach you how to walk again, after we're done.

You're in an advanced stage, and the brain lesions complicate things.

I think you have almost a coin-flip of a chance.

We see all the very hard cases here. Even though you're in the poor-prognosis category, we've cured a lot worse.

If you aren't scared, you aren't normal.

I'm ready to crush this thing.

Without belief, we would be left with nothing but overwhelming doom.

I'm glad about this. You know what? I like it like this. I like the odds stacked against me.

I envisioned the chemo working on them, singeing them, and expelling them from my system.

I was coughing up cancer, pissing it out, getting rid of it every way I knew how.

I suppose that's how you do it. They've got to go somewhere, don't they?

I insisted on behaving as if I was a full participant in the cure.

The drugs would penetrate into my system through the night, and I would wake up the next day in a thick cloud of nausea.

It was hard to believe that a substance so deadly could appear so innocuous.

I made it my enemy, my challenge. The Bastard, I called it.

I knew that if I was going to be cured, that was the way it would go, with a big surging attack, just like in a race.

Cancer picked the wrong guy; when it looked around for a body to hang out in, it made a big mistake when it chose mine.

I wanted everyone to see that I was okay, and still able to ride—and maybe I was trying to prove it to myself, too.

"I was a cancer survivor first and an athlete second."

"We cause people to reconsider their limits, to see that what looks like a wall may really just be an obstacle in the mind."

"Illness was not unlike athletic performance in that respect: there is so much we don't know about our human capacity, and I felt it was important to spread the message."

"It's common. It's more difficult to wait for it to come back than it is to attack it."

"Having cancer was easier than recovery—at least in chemo I was doing something, instead of just waiting for it to come back."

"One day, I thought, I'm going to lose a battle, but I might not lose the war."

"Carpe diem, I told myself, seize the day. Whatever I had, I was going to spend it well."

"I could either sit around and worry about the future, or go out and actively embrace every minute I had."

"If you want to just annihilate me, you can. Because there's nothing left to block you. So be careful what you do."

"You know, I would rather have one year of wonderful than seventy years of mediocre."

I know now that surviving cancer involved more than just a convalescence of the body. My mind and my soul had to convalesce, too.

You need to decide something. You need to decide if you are going to retire for real, and be a golf-playing, beer-drinking, Mexican-food-eating slob.

It was time to quit stalling, I realized. Move, I told myself. If you can still move, you aren't sick.

The decision to abandon had nothing to do with how I felt physically. I was strong. I just didn't want to be there.

WHAT YOU LEARN IN SURVIVORSHIP is THAT AFTER ALL the shouting is done, after the desperation and crisis is over, the old routines and habits... are the threads that tie your days together.

I wanted to have a child. When I was sick, fatherhood was something obscured around the next bend, perhaps impossible, a lost chance.

As I rode upward, I reflected on my life, back to all points, my childhood, my early races, my illness, and how it changed me.

One of the things I loved about Boone was the view it offered. When I cycled around an unexpected bend in the road, suddenly the landscape opened up.

I was meant for a long, hard climb.

It made me feel more alive than anything I had experienced yet. It made me feel as clean and reverent as Boone.

"Life is long—hopefully, but 'long' is a relative term."

"It's a contest in purposeless suffering. But for reasons of my own, I think it may be the most gallant athletic endeavor in the world."

"I focused everything I had on it. I was willing to sacrifice the entire season to prepare for the Tour."

"There was a sort of peace in the simplicity of our dedication."

"To win the Tour I had to be willing to ride when no one else would ride."

"I climbed those hundreds of meters, sucking in the thin mountain air, and I thought of that movie, and grinned."

"There's nothing to find ... and once everyone has done their due diligence and realizes they need to be professional and can't print a lot of crap, they'll realize they're dealing with a clean guy."

"If you ever get a second chance in life for something, you've got to go all the way."

"I wore the yellow jersey, but I figure maybe the only thing that belongs to me is the zipper. My teammates deserve the rest."

"Oh my God, I said. I won the Tour de France. 'No way,' she said. We burst out laughing."

I would rather have the title of cancer survivor than winner of the Tour, because of what it has done for me as a human being.

Maybe, as my friend Phil Knight says, I am hope.

Things take place, there is a confluence of events and circumstances, and we can't always know their purpose, or even if there is one.

But we can take responsibility for ourselves and be brave.

The definition of courage is: the quality of spirit that enables one to encounter danger with firmness and without fear.

Sometimes little kids seem better equipped to deal with cancer than grown-ups are.

If children have the ability to ignore odds and percentages, then maybe we can all learn from them.

Anything's possible.

The one thing the illness has convinced me of beyond all doubt—more than any experience I've had as an athlete—is that we are much better than we know.

I believe I have an obligation to make something better out of my life than before.