A Quote by Michael Phelps

I'm fortunate to have an amazing, strong mother who is so supportive of everything me and my sisters did growing up - but she was someone who never forced us to go swim or to go do this or that. She helped us think about certain consequences when we needed to, but we made our own decisions. I think if I were forced to swim, I wouldn't have stayed in the pool as long as I did.
I was raised by a lady that was crippled all her life but she did everything for me and she raised me. She washed our clothes, cooked our food, she did everything for us. I don't think I ever heard her complain a day in her life. She taught me responsibility towards my brother and sisters and the community.
My mother never put an emphasis on looks. She let us grow up on our own time line. She never forced any beauty regimen into my world.
For my father the one calamity was that my brother and sister and I never learned to swim. My father, who was very macho, was a strong swimmer and was terribly disappointed to have children who didn't swim. Once when my mother was sitting in a beach chair - I can still see the big umbrella - she called to my father, "Throw them in! Throw them in! They'll swim!" So he did. Then he looked down, and there were the three Sendak children lying perfectly still underwater, not fighting for life!
Both of my parents are music teachers. My mother owns the school that I taught in. My brothers and sisters are musicans. My mom pushed me all the time. She knew that I could do it. She knew more than I did. She thought I would go somewhere. She gave me the job and helped me get equipment, which a lot of parents don't do. Alot of my students had to go out and fight for it.
One thing I did have under my belt was, my mother lost her mother when she was 11. She mourned her mother her whole life and made my grandmother seem present even though I never met her. I couldn't imagine how my mom could go on but she did, she took care of us, she worked two jobs and had four children. She was such a good example of how to conduct oneself in a time of grief. When I lost my husband, I tried to model myself as much as I could on her.
I think Rowdy Gaines actually said something like: Katie Ledecky doesn't swim like a man. She swims like Katie Ledecky.And that was a good comment. I swim the way I swim. And I take it as a compliment when somebody says I swim like a man, because, as you said, my stroke is kind of taken after what some of the male freestylers have done. But I'm just trying to go as fast as I can go.
But I think what made me go into theater was seeing my mother onstage. The first thing she did was Mrs. Frank in 'The Diary of Anne Frank.' The second thing she did was a play about Freud called 'The Far Country.' She played a paralyzed woman in Vienna who goes to see Freud.
The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.
My mother is an amazing woman. Not only did she manage the entire household, she noticed a gift in each of her kids and instilled confidence in all of us that that gift would take us wherever we wanted to go.
When I was growing up, my mother taught me and my sisters to celebrate each other - there was no room in our household for negativity. She taught us to embrace each other, and this was empowering for us. She also taught us the value of celebrating our differences.
My mother is everything to me. She's my anchor, she's the person I go to when I need to talk to someone. She is an amazing woman.
I think it gave us the freedom to be more creative and do things the way we wanted to do them, so if a label liked it that was cool and if they didn't like it fine. Ultimately it was up to us to sink or swim and there was nobody telling us what direction to go in. I think that made the entire record more diverse.
John and I were lucky because our mother was a strong woman with high expectations and a strong sense of values. She encouraged us to pursue things we were interested in and not think about what other people wanted us to do.
But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think? Before she knew it was candles, did she think she'd done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips, and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?
Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children... It was a fleeting statement, one I didn't think she'd hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us. That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.
Growing up in Alaska, they don't really teach you to swim there. I learned to swim just a few summers ago with Olympic gold medalist Amanda Beard. She did great, and right after that I went to get scuba certified. I had fun with it. I didn't really get scared, but some people thought that was a risk.
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