Always Looking Up Quotes

“I have no argument with those who see in organized religion a template or an imperative to live life according to a prescribed set of beliefs. Just give others the room, within the laws of civil society, to believe or not believe whatever they like.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“You suffer the blow, but you capitalize on the opportunity left in its wake.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“Chris[topher] Reeve wisely parsed the difference between optimism and hope. Unlike optimism, he said, 'Hope is the product of knowledge and the projection of where the knowledge can take us.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“As with any turning point or instance when a new road is chosen and an old one forsaken, there are consequences.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“The purpose that you wish to find in life, like a cure you seek, is not going to fall from the sky....I believe purpose is something for which one is responsible; it's not just divinely assigned.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“Hanging out with Sam or any two-year-old is basically one big suicide watch. Their mission is to find one new way after another of offing themselves - piss in an electric socket, lick a pit bull's nose, chase an ice cream truck into traffic - and your job as a parent is to step in before it happens.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“Listening to people espouse beliefs different from mine is informative, not threatening, because the only thing that can alter my worldview is a new and undeniable truth, and contrary to what Jack Nicholson says in 'A Few Good Men'," I CAN handle the truth.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“To be brutally honest, for much of that time, I was the only person in the world with Parkinson's. Of course, I mean that in the abstract. I had become acutely aware of people around me who appears to have the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, but as long as they didn't identify with me, I was in no rush to identify with them. My situation allowed, if not complete denial, at least a thick padding of insulation.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“He gave life to the breath- oxygen, a simple gas, he transferred into words, ideas, hope.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“I saw, during the midterm campaign of 2006, how difficult it was for opponents of stem cell research to run against hope. And so it was in the 2008 presidential contest. This was hope in the collective, a definition that should always apply to the expression of a people's political will. Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope. In this case, the informing agent wasus.Granted, it may all look different in six months to a year, but it is hard not to be buoyed by the desire for positive change as articulated and advanced by Barack Obama. It is okay to hope. This time the aspiration of many will not be derided as desperation by a few, as it was during the stem cell debate of '06.

By the time you read this book, President Obama and the 111th Congress will have established federal funding for stem cell research. The dam has broken.

Just as I'd hoped.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“Going public was a difficult decision, and I had misgivings. My subjective experience was now an objective fact in the wider world. It didn't belong to just me anymore - though I quickly learned that it hadn't belonged to just me in the first place. More than a million Americans and their families were going through the same thing; some openly, some in secret due to concerns of being misunderstood and marginalized.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“I wouldn't have minded living in Provence for a month or however long it took for me to learn to say, 'I've been attacked by a wild boar. Help me find my spleen!”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“Some of the best friends you'll ever meet in your life, you'll meet though your children--mothers and fathers of their friends, parents from school. You'll see. That's the way it was for Bill and me. It's one of the many gifts of parenting.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“A lighthouse...speaks to the guiding nature of hope. By equal turns, it illuminates and darkens, so the way forward can be chosen in the light, and trusted in the darkness.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“Frankly, my height or lack thereof never bothered me much. Although there is no doubt that it has contributed to a certain mental toughness. I've made the most of the head start one gains from being underestimated.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“It never occurred to me that any of these pleasures were a reward for being a pretty good kid, any more than I needed to restructure my life just to avoid an eternity of being spit-roasted on a subterranean barbecue. If this sounds flip, smug, or disrespectful, it's not meant to be. Obviously, there is great wisdom, beauty, and relevance in millennia worth of collected theological teaching from around the world. The question I'm grappling with is: why didn't these big themes and major stick-and-carrot extremes resonate with me? I just never bought into the concept. Maybe I'm part of a small minority, but I don't think so.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“Every failure I have considered my own, but every success has been shared.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“The only unavailable choice was whether or not to have Parkinson's. Everything else was up to me.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“I’m sure there are many other Forrest Gump moments that I’m forgetting. I don’t mention them as boasts, but rather as evidence of how ridiculously lucky I have been to have lived the life that I have.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“Sure, it may be one step forward and two steps back, but after a time with Parkinson's, I've learned that what is important is making that step count; always looking up.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“The reflected version of myself, wet, shaking, rumpled, pinched and slightly stooped, would be alarming were it not for the self-satisfied expression pasted across my face. I would ask the obvious question," What are you smiling about? "but I already know the answer:" It just gets better from here ".”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“Chris defined hero as “an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“The American political experience can therefore be viewed as optimism in the collective.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“A cultura judaica, eu começava a entender, colocava uma estrutura e um ritual em volta dessa transição [da infância para a vida adulta], instruindo essas formas de vida emergentes a reconhecer e aceitar suas responsabilidades consigo mesmo, com suas famílias e com os outros. Elas são aclamadas e celebradas bem quando estão mais suscetíveis a se sentir indesejadas e incompreendidas. (p. 180)”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“Incurable disease is a nonpartisan problem that will require a bipartisan solution. The desire to alleviate suffering and save lives speaks not to our allegiance to any party or ideology but to our humanity.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“Chris focused not on the “What happened?” but on the “What now?” “Before a catastrophe, we can’t imagine coping with the burdens that might confront us in a dire moment. Then when that moment arrives, we suddenly find that we have resources inside us that we knew nothing about,”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist

“Either you decide to stay in the shallow end of the pool, or you go out in the ocean.”
― Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist