I felt permanently exiled from 'normality.' Whether imposed by self or society, this outsider status - and not the disability itself - constitutes the most daunting barrier for most people with physical impairments, because it, even more than flights of steps or elevators without braille, prevents them from participating fully in the ordinary world, where most of life's satisfactions dwell.

Writing is not, alas, like riding a bicycle: it does not get easier with practice.

Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can't love what we won't experience.

In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.

Who one believes God to be is most accurately revealed not in any credo but in the way one speaks to God when no one else is listening.

people who seem most hostile to my presence are those most fearful of my fate. And since their fear keeps them emotionally distant from me, they are the ones least likely to learn that my life isn't half so dismal as they assume.

Do others, I wondered, "see things as I do? I do not think so, for if they did they would not still be alive." And, life-threatening though my vision seemed, I would not repudiate it: "Sometimes I think I shall die from being different even as I cling to the difference fiercely."