Top 109 Quotes & Sayings by Amy Purdy

The thing with prosthetic feet is you can't have all this crazy motion, or you'd be all over the place - because it's mechanical, and it's outside your body.

I'm learning how strong I am, how resilient I am. I'm learning my weaknesses.

I've never wanted sympathy votes in anything I do in my life.

I was 19 years old, and I felt like I had the flu one day. Within 24 hours, I was in the hospital on life support, and I was given less than a 2 percent chance of living. It took five days for the doctors to find out that I had contracted bacterial meningitis.

My dad had given my sister and I our starter car, a red, old 1985 Chevy Blazer. It was so beat up, the taillights would fall off, and we would use red duct tape.

We all have challenges. You can let them be obstacles or roadblocks, or you can use them.

Of course, I was 19 years old, and I suddenly lost my legs. It was extremely traumatic at the time, but I'm so beyond that. I've done so much with my life.

My motivation is not to try to inspire, but rather to do things that inspire me and hopefully that will spread to others.

We all have things that limit us and that challenge us. But really, our real limitations are the ones we believe.

If somebody would've told me that I was going to lose my legs at the age of 19, I would've thought there's absolutely no way I'd be able to handle that. But then it happened, and I realized that there's so much more to live for, that my life isn't about my legs.

I want to go to dinner with Oprah! Who doesn't?

You don't have to be positive all the time.

As humans, we need to reach out for support.

As for how do I respond to those who want to throw stones, well, I don't.

Oprah has been a true inspiration to me, so I'm truly grateful both to her for taking the time to speak with me, and to the folks at 'DWTS' who set it all up.

In snowboarding, I've always looked at really strong competitors through a lens of gratitude rather than envy in the sense that the better my competition is, the more it forces me to work hard, focus, and be better myself if I want to succeed, which I do.

That's the problem with bacterial meningitis: it progresses really fast. You think you have the flu, and they say within 15 hours it's severely deadly - for sure within the first 24 hours - but even the first 15 hours.

Yes, there are things that I can't change, but the things I can, I'm going to do everything in my power to work very hard through them and come out stronger on the other side.

Road trips to me are just such an escape. You listen to your music, and you roll the windows down. You're usually going to somewhere fun.

I have two prosthetic legs. This is my life; what am I going to do with it? And it's put me on this amazing journey. I can look back and be completely grateful and say I would never want to change anything.

Just the thought of being on Oprah's radar at all is humbling, but to actually have her take time get on the phone with me kind of blows my mind.

I have a very good sense of my body and where it's at. Although I don't feel the ground in the same way that somebody else would, I'm very aware... I can feel pressure, and I know exactly where my toes are and exactly where my heel is.

I feel that losing both my legs was a blessing. It was meant to happen to me: I wouldn't have had the opportunity to touch so many lives in such a positive way.

If you want something bad enough and you work hard enough, anything's possible.

I got this second chance at life, and I live it.

I love the smell of rain, and I love the sound of the ocean waves.

When I turned 16 and got my license, the Chevy Blazer was passed down from my sister, so it was very much a starter car.

I'm very grateful that I've had the opportunities I've had.

We've all seen that every challenge we've gone through, we've learned something from. It's not getting hung up on the challenges but figuring out how to get ahead.

I grew up born and raised in Las Vegas and actually grew up skiing. You know, we've got some ski resorts close to Las Vegas, up in Mount Charleston or Brian Head, so I grew up skiing and snowboarding.

Since losing my legs, I've found out that I am able to help other people by sharing how I've overcome my obstacles.

What's cool is that Oprah is the same person on stage and in front of a camera as she is off stage and behind the scenes. She speaks the same way on camera as she does off camera.

The way I look at it is, we all have disabilities.

I simply do the things that inspire me, be that snowboarding, designing clothing, or dancing.

I was in kidney failure. I ended up having a kidney transplant on my 21st birthday.

My legs haven't disabled me. If anything, they've enabled me.

I lost my spleen, I lost the hearing in my left ear, so I had a lot of internal organ damage.

It's when I compare myself to what other people are able to do that I run into trouble. It is a bummer. I just constantly try to put things into perspective.

I want to live a fulfilling life.

There are plenty of people who have legs who are way more disabled than me.

I've learned that borders are where the actual ends, but also where the imagination and the story begins.

Growing up in the hot Last Vegas desert, all I wanted was to be free. I would daydream about traveling the world, living in a place where it snowed, and I would picture all of the stories that I would go on to tell.

I'm so comfortable on my snowboard that I don't have to think about it very much; it's somewhat second nature.

If we can see past preconceived limitations, then the possibilities are endless.

Just because I've got two prosthetic legs, yeah, I had to adapt in ways, but I've also become a lot stronger. It doesn't mean I'm at any disadvantage, really.

Pfizer's actually teamed up with my nonprofit organization, which is called Adaptive Action Sports. I cofounded this organization in 2005 to help people with physical disabilities get involved in action sports, go snowboarding, skateboarding.

I knew I loved music, and I knew that I could feel music. So, I knew I had rhythm.

I believe inspiration is contagious.

I knew I loved dancing with my friends.

Every day that I am healthy, I want to use that day to its fullest now.

The human foot has bones and muscles and can balance back and forth. If you step and you maybe make a little mistake, your foot can compensate. But if I step in the wrong spot, my foot isn't going to compensate because it's just one piece of carbon fiber.

I lost the life that I knew, and I really had to rethink my future and think about my core values and the things that I love, and my passion, and that's really what helped me move forward. Also, for me just being grateful for what I had in my life versus on focusing on what I was losing, that really helped as well.

There are no rules in snowboarding.

We did everything we could to save my legs, and it just came to a point where if we didn't amputate my legs, I wouldn't survive. In that situation, you kind of go into survival mode, and you find strength.

I kind of had to figure stuff out on my own and get myself snowboarding competitively again. I went through all types of different legs to try to learn which were going to work for me. Luckily, I was able to figure it out.

If your life were a book and you were the author, how would you want your story to go? That's the question that changed my life forever.

If you believe that you can't do something, then you're not going to do it. If you believe you can, and you're willing to put in the effort and figure out a way to do it, then the majority of the time, you can.

I always say snowboarding saved my life. It gave me a reason to focus on the future; it gave me something to be passionate about.

Dancing is about expressing yourself, and the more walls you let down, the better.

I didn't think about money or cars or anything like that.