Quotes from Laura Hillenbrand

I'm attracted to subjects who overcome tremendous suffering and learn to cope emotionally with it.

For 'Seabiscuit', I interviewed 100 people I never met.

People think I must have been turning cartwheels on the night I sealed the movie deal - which was only two days after sealing the book deal - but I was really quite terrified.

I've used a cellphone exactly twice. Things move on. The world changes. And I don't know it.

Most people, when they hear the disease name, it's all they know about it. It sounds so mild. When I first was sick, for the first 10 years or so, I was dismissed. I was ridiculed and told I was lazy. It was a joke.

I spoke to my agent and learned that a Hollywood scout had seen my proposal in one of the publishing houses, and had faxed it to Hollywood, where it was generating a lot of interest.

His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

Fatigue is what we experience, but it is what a match is to an atomic bomb.

I am disabled, so I can't travel, and I have not been to any development meetings, but Gary and the others affiliated with the film keep me updated on everything.

It only worked for a little while the morning after I agreed to go with Universal, an article came out in the Hollywood trade papers, and the secret was out.

I am actually in poor health due to chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome, and my ability to work is greatly diminished right now, so I have to get better before I can start another big project.

Louie and Seabiscuit were both Californians and both on the sports pages in the 1930s. I was fascinated. When I learned about his World War II experiences, I thought, 'If this guy is still alive, I want to meet him.'

While it's really hard to do, at the same time, I'm escaping my body, which I really want to do. I'm living someone else's life. I get very intensely into the story, into the interviews and the research. I'm experiencing things along with my subjects. I have a freedom I don't have in my physical life.

I'm looking for a way out of here. I can't have it physically, so I'm going to have it intellectually. It was a beautiful thing to ride Seabiscuit in my imagination. And it's just fantastic to be there alongside Louie as he's breaking the NCAA mile record. People at these vigorous moments in their lives - it's my way of living vicariously.

We just sat there and watched the plane pass the island, and it never came back," he said. "I could see it on the radar. It makes you feel terrible. Life was cheap in war.

That night, before he tried to sleep, Louie prayed. He had prayed only once before in his life, in childhood, when his mother was sick and he had been filled with a rushing fear that he would lose her. That night on the raft, in words composed in his head, never passing his lips, he pleaded for help.

He (Thomas Smith) believed with complete conviction that no animal was permanently ruined. Every horse could be improved. He lived by a single maxim: 'Learn your horse. Each one is an individual, and once you penetrate his mind and heart, you can often work wonders with an otherwise intractable beast.

The racehorse, by virtue of his awesome physical gifts, freed the jockey from himself. When a horse and a jockey flew over the track together, there were moments in which the man's mind wedded itself to the animal's body to form something greater than the sum of both parts.

We had to rebuild him, both mentally and physically, but you don't have to rebuild the heart when it's already there, big as all outdoors.

resentment, the emotion that, Jane Amery would write, 'nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past.'

Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die. . . . They are only changed by the way people treat them.

In seeking the Bird's death to free himself, Louie had chained himself, once again, to his tyrant. During the war, the Bird had been unwilling to let go of Louie; after the war, Louie was unable to let go of the Bird.

His body was worn and weathered, his skin scratched with lines mapping the miles of his life.

The buses drove to the Olympic stadium. Entering in a parade of nations and standing at attention, the athletes were treated to a thunderous show that culminated in the release of twenty thousand doves. As the birds circled in panicked confusion, cannons began firing, prompting the birds to relieve themselves over the athletes. With each report, the birds let fly. Louie stayed at attention, shaking with laughter.