Samuel Wilson Fussell > Quotes

“The gym was the one place I had control. I didn’t have to speak, I didn’t have to listen. I just had to push or pull. It was so much simpler, so much more satisfying than life outside.

I didn’t have to think. I didn’t have to care. I didn’t have to feel.

I simply had to lift.”
― Samuel Wilson Fussell, Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder

“I became a bodybuilder as a means of becoming a caricature. The inflated cartoon I became relieved me from the responsibility of being human. But once I'd become that caricature, that inflated cartoon, I longed for something else. As painful and humiliating it is to be human, being subhuman or superhuman is far worse.”
― Samuel Wilson Fussell