Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist Quotes.

1. "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

2. "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

3. "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

4. "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

5. "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

6. "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

7. "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

8. "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

9. "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

10. "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 was us. 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