Quotes from Shawn Johnson

I love lean meats like chicken, turkey. I'm obsessed with sushi and fish in general. I eat a lot of veggies and hummus.

I fell in love with running, and I finally have time to do it now.

When I was 3 my parents put me in gymnastics because I was a bundle of energy and they just didn't know what to do with me! They put me in a Tots class and I just fell in love with it.

I think about my goals. There were a lot of times in gymnastics when I really didn't want to go in and train, but you can't make it to the Olympics if you don't train!

My knee is almost back to normal. I am back in training.

After 13 years of hard landings in gymnastics, one ski run had delivered the biggest injury of my career.

My coach, Liang Chow, had one rule while I was training for the 2008 Olympics: no skiing. I could do anything I wanted outside the gym, he said, except ski.

It's been strange and weird watching the other girls at the U.S. Olympic trials just because I was training to be out there myself.

I want to go to college, obviously go to London and just kind of figure out the rest of my life.

When I was younger, my coach, Liang Chow, made all the decisions. I would go to the gym for practice, do exactly what Chow told me to do, go home, come back and start all over again. If Chow told me to do 50 squat jumps, I did 50 squat jumps.

The body is an amazing machine... If you eat the right things your body will perform incredibly well!

To have any doubt in your body is the biggest weakness an athlete can have. There are times when I physically can't get myself to go for a skill because I'm thinking, 'My knee hurts really bad.'

Everybody sacrifices something in an attempt to reach what they think society wants.

I have a lot of expectations and a lot of goals I want to fulfill, but the biggest dream is still to make the Olympic team for London.

I get less and less sleep these days, so when I have any down time all I want to do is sleep!

I know how much more I need to do to be where I want.

I started from zero and went back to the basics in gymnastics.

Every year I just kept going back to gymnastics, but I didn't start out training 10 hours a day. When I turned 10 or 11, I got more serious and I focused a lot on making it to the elite level, and from there I just kept going.

It sounds funny, but the 2008 Olympics were something that just kind of happened, and I was lucky they came at a point when I was uninjured and well prepared. As a gymnast, you can't ask for much more.

I always have someone to look up to, and I think it helps me with motivating myself.

I don't feel like a star; I never have. I don't feel like a star; I never have. I always feel like I'm the young one, I'm the small one. I always have someone to look up to, and I think it helps me with motivating myself.

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.

I had a constant fear, a constant little doubt in my mind: 'OK, I'm getting ready to do my standing back full on beam and I might re-tear my ACL.'

With literature, sometimes a book is presented in the media as being say, a Muslim story or an African story, when essentially it's a universal story which we can all relate to it, no matter what race or social background we come from.