“My eldest sister Beth is a doctor who studied at Harvard and Columbia ...” — Abby Wambach Quote

My eldest sister Beth is a doctor who studied at Harvard and Columbia and played basketball for Harvard. She set the athletic and academic standard for the rest of us to follow.

I'll be honest. After I got married, I definitely had a shift in emotional devotion.

I always think that struggle can bring out the best in people - or the worst.

You can't cry when things get a little bit hard. You've just got to push through and know that there's a reason and end to the means.

Considering retirement is like skirting with the reality of what's to come, and I think that's why so many athletes decide to do more introspection at that point.

In fact I was slightly badly behaved at school and got in trouble. I would get a bee in my bonnet about something I thought wasn't right, and I would ape about too, to make everybody laugh. That was my way through my girls' school, because I wasn't very academic.

I wanted to be a novelist from a very early age - 11 or 12 - but I don't think I ever thought I would write historical fiction. I never thought I might write academic history because I simply wasn't good enough!

The greatest sin of the academic left is that it has become fundamentally aristocratic, writing in bizarre jargon that makes cliches seem abstruse. If you can't explain your ideal to a fairly intelligent 12-year-old, it's probably your own fault.

I never thought I was academically gifted at school. But when I started flying, I found you didn't need an academic mind - you just needed determination and dedication.