I missed being considered an athlete and having that competitive drive, and missed having something to work for every day. I'd taken two and a half years away from the sport and was out of shape. I wanted to get back to where I was in 2008.
But after a few minutes of convincing myself that I really wanted to go - telling myself that I love skating and that my coach is there waiting for me - I would get up and go. And my mother would always get up and eat breakfast with me!
As a kid in Africa, you were so connected to nature itself because you went farming, watched the moon out at night, observed how the sky was different, and how the birds chanted different songs in the evening and the morning.
The white men in the East are like birds. They are hatching out their eggs every year, and there is not room enough in the East, and they must go elsewhere; and they come out West, as you have seen them coming for the last few years.
My mother stopped working when she had my brother. She was a full time mom until I started getting heavily into ice skating lessons, and it got to the point where they really needed my mom to earn an income.
No matter what, like, I couldn't - I could break a world record, get an Olympic gold medal, and my mom would be, like, you could have done better. But you looked pretty. That's what she says all the time.
Melanie Daniels: [worriedly, as she sees a man from the restaurant window lighting his cigar as gasoline is leaking around him] Look at the gas, that man's lighting a cigar!
We do not use managers, we are the representatives of our athletes, and that is why I am deeply involved in athletics, I follow our athletes careers from start to finish, 100% all the way.
If we carry on filling up the calendar, we keep on pushing the athlete, we shorten the athletes longevity. The risk is to shorten a career that could have lasted 10 years because the athlete is burnt out.
I am always fighting inside the Council to get the message across that at each competition venue, we should send somebody to inspect and to make sure the athletes will be looked after in a correct manner.
His unit is in charge of 5,000 homes, and they've only been able to search about 2 percent of them. People are standing on roofs or sticking their hands out of air vents so they can get rescued.
Don't let someone keep putting out the flame God keeps re-lighting, we all have a purpose. As a wing to a bird. As wind that goes the destiny over the sea.
I want to live 50 more years. I'm 33 years old... and I want to live to at least be 80 and see my kids grow up and see my grandkids. That's important to me.
If I would have listened to other people back in 2000 telling me I should have stopped playing basketball because of a kidney disease, I wouldn't have won a world championship.
Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree.
I am almost 30 so I am approaching this one as if it will be my last Olympic Games. I want to put out 110 percent to make sure that I am up at the top.
I've never enjoyed my running more. I also do 200 sit-ups a day, 60 push-ups, and a lot of stretching. I've had some back issues. I think the stretching helps with that.
Beijing didn't go the way I planned and I would have liked to have performed a little bit better personally. After Beijing that is what stuck in my mind. I want a better Olympic finish.
I went from just a regular nappy-headed kid in poverty to Amar'e Stoudemire, New York Knicks captain superstar. But there's a lot in between that allowed me to get from point A to point B.
I want people to see a real person on the ice. I want to seem tangible, hard-working, passionate about my skating, not just going out and doing something I've rehearsed a million times.
In this crazy, crazy world of figure skating, it is easy to focus on a name or a target. But when you are going after someone, it really only holds you back from what you are capable of yourself.
