Kristi Yamaguchi Quotes

I'm a perfectionist.

This experience has been once in a lifetime.

I'd try to channel my nervous energy in a positive way into strength and endurance. It didn't always work.

Figure skaters have awful perceptions of hockey players.

Being an athlete, you know how to train and prepare your body for a performance and you're able to do it under pressure.

I never wanted to feel I hadn't worked hard enough.

Now, I am thrilled to be a wife and mother, and I hope to be as good of a mother as my own mother, Carole.

I feel like I missed out on the regular high school social life, but that's the way I chose to be.

I'm kind of a homebody. My husband says I like to just stay home and do nothing, but that's just how I am.

I burnt myself out of skating. I was ready to focus on being a mom.

Dorothy Hamill was my big idol as a kid. She'd won the Olympics in 1976. She was America's sweetheart with her personality, her talent, her haircut.

Every day, someone realizes a dream. I believe dreams help light our darkness and give us the push we need to move across the rink of life.

The past couple years training with Kurt have really brought inspiration into my skating.

As a teenager especially, I just wanted to do my thing and not be noticed.

I'm always looking for inspiring ways to stay motivated and stay active.

My experience at the 1992 Winter Olympics was my fulfillment of dreaming the Impossible Dream.

I didn't want to skate for someone else or for certain marks.

The good feeling I get from contributing rivals anything I felt on the Olympic stand in Albertville.

One of my mottos not only just in skating but in life in general and I try to enforce it as well, is like no regrets and just like going for it.

Winning in women's singles felt surreal. I felt that everything I had done - the hard work, the tough times - was all worth it.

Training for the Olympics was a lifelong endeavor and took many years.

There are two or three performances in your life that are absolutely on, where all the planets are lined up for you and you feel you're invincible.

They say, once you have a child, your heart is forever outside your body. I totally understand that now.

Childhood reading is so important.

I've had a lot more fun with the training.

Before turning pro, I would never have just left my skates sitting in the locker room unattended.