Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life.

---

By the time I was 12 I was challenging every boy in our neighborhood at running, jumping, everything.

---

The triumph can't be had without the struggle. And I know what struggle is. I have spent a lifetime trying to share what it has meant to be a woman first in the world of sports so that other young women have a chance to reach their dreams.

---

i thought I'd never get to see that. Florence Griffith Joyner -- every time she ran, I ran.

---

Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us.

---

I ran and ran and ran every day, and I acquired this sense of determination, this sense of spirit that I would never, never give up, no matter what else happened.

---

I know black women in Tennessee who have worked all their lives, from the time they were twelve years old to the day they died. These women don't listen to the women's liberation rhetoric because they know that it's nothing but a bunch of white women who had certain life-styles and who want to change those life-styles.

---

I can't' are two words that have never been in my vocabulary. I believe in me more than anything in this world.

---

I'm in my prime. There's no goal too far, no mountain too high.

---

My mother taught me very early to believe I could achieve any accomplishment I wanted to. The first was to walk without braces.

---