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It's really hard to separate fantasy from reality.
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You see your peers weighing 80 pounds and you think, 'Oh, my God, I've got to be 80 pounds or I'll fail.'
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I have three dogs and a cockatoo.
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Seeing the show is like a visit to the fountain of youth for parents and the children.
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This is so much better than flying on a balance beam or on the uneven bars, where you don't have the fairy dust to keep you up. And it was just such a great sense of freedom.
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I was always very active as a kid. I would climb on roofs and jump off using my parents' bed sheet, hoping it would open like a parachute. I was always getting hurt, breaking a leg, you know, bruising, cracking my head open.
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I would climb on roofs and jump off using my parents' bed sheet, hoping it would open like a parachute. I was always getting hurt, breaking a leg, you know, bruising, cracking my head open.
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I'll talk to kids afterward and somebody will always say, 'I'll leave my bedroom window open for you.
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Nowadays a gold medal is a $1 million contract. Our athletes are our heroes.
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When you're on the Olympic team at 15, you don't do anything else. There's no normal social development, and your decisions are made for you.
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There's so much denial in gymnastics. It's a beautiful sport but the other part is numbing. You become machinelike. They'll refute this, but I've been around it. I know.
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I never realized until recently how much my life parallels Peter Pan.
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They are sweating as much as anyone onstage. Their focus has to be that of somebody working on the balance beam. We're all three in sync. We have to feel what the other is doing. One lifts me up, the other, side to side. They're like puppeteers almost.
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It's that athlete's obsessiveness - the need to prove yourself and work harder than anybody else. I think it's what helped me do well in the theater.
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There's no disgrace in failure, the disgrace is not to try.
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For the parents, it is a way to be young physically and emotionally for awhile and not have to deal with the troubles of the world.
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I just like to act.
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So it really does have a sort of bittersweet quality. Kids like to have adventures and to believe they can fly, but there's also that fear about people leaving you.
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I will miss it terribly because it's been a fabulous run for me, but there are other things I want to do. It's one of those roles that is so amazingly physically demanding. I would never want to do it halfway. I think it's the best it can be right now, and I don't want it to be anything but that.
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You're just into it at that point and you're alive on stage and you get away with mischief and good stuff and you know, I don't know many adults who get to do that.
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I remember secretly going off and crying. All of a sudden I'm being blocked and have to be intimate in a scene, and I'm going, 'I can't even look people in the eye very well. How am I ever going to do this?'
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Actually, performing is a lot like golf. You are alone, so vulnerable.
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I will jump into most any role.
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I've been able to play a kid up to this point and pretend that I'm not a grown-up - well, at least for two hours a night!