Top 26 Quotes & Sayings by Cathy Rigby

I'll talk to kids afterward and somebody will always say, 'I'll leave my bedroom window open for you.

You see your peers weighing 80 pounds and you think, 'Oh, my God, I've got to be 80 pounds or I'll fail.'

I would climb on roofs and jump off using my parents' bed sheet, hoping it would open like a parachute. I was always getting hurt, breaking a leg, you know, bruising, cracking my head open.

When you're on the Olympic team at 15, you don't do anything else. There's no normal social development, and your decisions are made for you.

I was always very active as a kid. I would climb on roofs and jump off using my parents' bed sheet, hoping it would open like a parachute. I was always getting hurt, breaking a leg, you know, bruising, cracking my head open.

I never realized until recently how much my life parallels Peter Pan.

I grew up in a sport that didn't allow you to grow up. There was always the threat of younger competition. So you had to maintain the image of youth.

Acting allows me the freedom to let go, to be in the moment, to be spontaneous. I no longer have the fear of losing, of failure.

Nowadays a gold medal is a $1 million contract. Our athletes are our heroes.

I've been able to play a kid up to this point and pretend that I'm not a grown-up - well, at least for two hours a night!

Actually, performing is a lot like golf. You are alone, so vulnerable.

In high school I never went to the prom because I was too consumed with gymnastics. Also, with my hair in pigtails and looking about 10, I wasn't exactly date material.

I remember secretly going off and crying. All of a sudden I'm being blocked and have to be intimate in a scene, and I'm going, 'I can't even look people in the eye very well. How am I ever going to do this?'

I just like to act.

Flying is such a joy. You just want to hoot.

There's so much denial in gymnastics. It's a beautiful sport but the other part is numbing. You become machinelike. They'll refute this, but I've been around it. I know.

An athlete learns how to hold her breath, but that doesn't work in singing. You have to learn to relax.

It's that athlete's obsessiveness - the need to prove yourself and work harder than anybody else. I think it's what helped me do well in the theater.

Our athletes are our heroes.

So it really does have a sort of bittersweet quality. Kids like to have adventures and to believe they can fly, but there's also that fear about people leaving you.

I will jump into most any role.

It's really hard to separate fantasy from reality.

Seeing the show is like a visit to the fountain of youth for parents and the children.

I have three dogs and a cockatoo.

The thing I received from Girl Scouts more than anything else was a sense of real teamwork and working for the community, helping others, and it was not competitive. I remember working as a group to achieve a goal or to help the community. There was a great sense of accomplishment in that.

There's no disgrace in failure, the disgrace is not to try.