Quotes By Shawn Johnson

I'm pleased to say my knee feels a lot better. It's still not back to normal, and I don't know if it ever will be, but I'm learning to deal with it instead of expecting it to be like it was before.

I didn't make it a priority, and as a result my knee didn't heal to the extent it should have.

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

I was able to do Classics, the U.S. national championships and the Pan American Games and feel like I improved with each meet, but I was still struggling with a lot of residual pain from the two surgeries.

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.

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.'

Gymnastics taught me everything - life lessons, responsibility and discipline and respect.

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.

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

Of course, when you're training your whole life to get to the Olympics, you train for gold.

I live for Pilates reformer class. I go at least three times a week. It's a great way to lengthen your muscles, stretch, and kind of relax your mind.

I'm trying to stay as calm as possible and focus one day at a time, but when reality sets in, I feel everything: anxiety, excitement, nerves, pressure and joy.

My other life keeps me calm and grounded and normal.

Gymnastics is so complex.

Retiring was scary and it was tough to give up gymnastics, but so many great opportunities have come from it that I never expected.

I'm doing four hours of gymnastics training a day, six days a week and then an extra two to three hours in a fitness center as well.

Everything is about your movements and precision and timing, which is what gymnastics is about.

I always feel like I'm the young one, I'm the small one.

I still can't believe I'm an Olympic athlete.

I have a healthy lifestyle, but there's nothing you can really do to prevent from rolling an ankle or something like that.

I don't know where I'm really going to cha cha, but hopefully I can find a place.

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.

Something my mom taught me when I was little is that everything happens for a reason.

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

I told myself after 2008 that I was done for good. But they say you can't keep a gymnast away from her sport.

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 started taking gymnastic classes when I was 3 years old.

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.'

To finish off this whole Olympics by finally getting the gold medal, it's the best feeling in the world.

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.