“The most venomous animal that lives in the ocean is the box jellyfish. And every one of those barbs is sending that venom into this central nervous system. So first I feel like boiling hot oil I've been dipped in. And I'm yelling out, 'Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire! Help me! Somebody help me!' And the next thing is paralysis.”
“You have a dream 35 years ago - doesn't come to fruition, but you move on with life. But it's somewhere back there. Then you turn 60, and your mom just dies, and you're looking for something. And the dream comes waking out of your imagination.”
“For previous generations, swimming the English Channel was the feat to accomplish. And that's been done.”
“About the 50th hour, I was going to start thinking about the edge of the universe. Is there an edge? Is this an envelope we're living inside of, or no, does it go onto infinity in both time and space? And there's nothing like swimming for 50 hours in the ocean that gets you thinking about things like this.”
“I do write all the time about - you tell me what your dreams are. What are you chasing? It's not impossible. Name it.”
“I swam. We made it, our team, from the rocks of Cuba to the beach of Florida, in squeaky-clean, ethical fashion.”
“Write that novel. Start that business you've always wanted to. The ultimate high of life is the commitment to pursuing something.”
“In swimming, especially training out in the ocean and open water, you got fogged-over goggles, you're stuck with your own thoughts - there's great benefits to that, deep thinking like that after many hours, but there's also tremendous loneliness. You burn out. You want to run, jump, ski, do anything. So at age 30, I was finished.”
“There are some days where I'll eat 8,000 calories per day, on a day before a 12, 14, 18 hour swim. For a 61-year-old woman, that's a lot! And I try not to eat too much refined sugar - cookies, desserts, those sorts of things.”
“I don't want to be the crazy woman who does it for years and years and years, and tries and fails and tries and fails and tries and fails, but I can swim from Cuba to Florida, and I will swim from Cuba to Florida.”