A Quote by Amy Purdy

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 come from a family of storytellers. Growing up, my father would make up these stories about how he and my mother met and fell in love, and my mother would tell me these elaborately visual stories of growing up as a kid in New York, and I was always so enrapt.
I went to high school with girls that would daydream about what strip club they wanted to work at. That's one of the sad things about Vegas.
I wanted to make the world of 'The Last Book in the Universe' as real as possible, so I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I decided the world would be a very different place, but people would be pretty much the same.
Growing up, I was discouraged from telling personal stories. My dad often used the phrase 'Don't tell anyone.' But not about creepy things. I don't want to lead you down the wrong path. It would be about insignificant things. Like, I wouldn't make the soccer team, and my father would say, 'Don't tell anyone.'
Originally the dream was about traveling and developing a job that would permit me to travel. And I decided to go into street performing because it was a traveling job; it would let me go around the world.
When I was growing up, I would listen to a different album almost every night. I would do the full album experience before I went to bed and that's how I would discover a lot of music. I would kind of go into another world with my headphones on.
I was undeterred by the danger of traveling as a single American woman through Taliban-governed land. I believed in the stories I wanted to tell, the stories I felt were underreported, and I was convinced that that belief would keep me alive.
I was on the road with my brothers, traveling around the world, and things would be going well, and what would happen was that I'd be in a city, and there would be no way I'd know where to eat because I would only be there for 12 hours, and we wouldn't know where to go.
From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to give up; I wanted to give up on living. There was no denying that tomorrow would come, and the day after tomorrow, and so next week, too. I never thought it would be this hard, but I would go on living in the midst of a glomy depression, and that made me feel sick to the depths of my soul. In spite of the tempest raging within me, I walked the night path calmly.
I had three toy buckets, and I would put hot water in them because we weren't allowed to sit in the jacuzzi - we weren't old enough - so I would charge people $1, and everyone would line up, and everyone would sit in this disgusting hot water-sand-filled thing, and I would get $1 and go to the snack bar and get an Oreo.
If I had not been successful as a director, then I'm sure I would still be telling stories. I would have continued on 16mm or found a different medium through which to tell them. Maybe they would have been less glamorous than films, but I would continue to tell stories.
We wanted the humor to come from the characters and their world - you go down there to escape the world up here for a while. So when the crew would write jokes that would refer to American TV or culture, I'd just eliminate them because it just seemed odd that SpongeBob would know about it.
You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.
I would daydream about what it would be like to be an actor. I would even do talk shows where I interviewed myself.
So, you know, if, if I wanted to get up and just play golf one day, I would just get up and play golf. If I wanted to go to Vegas, I would just get up and go to Vegas.
I was so sure I wanted to be a novelist. I would spend hours and hours every day writing. Little stories about nothing in particular. I recall one about someone with an illness. But my dedication wasn't really healthy, and it reached the point where I wasn't sleeping. My mum would tell me, 'You need to go outside to get some fresh air.'
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