Disability Quotes

“Part of the problem with the word 'disabilities' is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can't feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren't able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities.”
― Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember

“The downside of my celebrity is that I cannot go anywhere in the world without being recognized. It is not enough for me to wear dark sunglasses and a wig. The wheelchair gives me away.”
― Stephen Hawking

“Miraculously recover or die. That's the extent of our cultural bandwidth for chronic illness.”
― S. Kelley Harrell

“It has been said that life has treated me harshly; and sometimes I have complained in my heart because many pleasures of human experience have been withheld from me…if much has been denied me, much, very much, has been given me…”
― Helen Keller, The Open Door

“Through their intellectual disability or mental illiteracy, some cannot free themselves from the imprisonment of irrevocable idiocy and feel condemned to find gratifying compensation by extracting the vilest qualities from the deep quarters of their dark self. ("Ugly mug offense")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Try not to associate bodily defect with mental, my good friend, except for a solid reason”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“I often wished that more people understood the invisible side of things. Even the people who seemed to understand, didn't really.”
― Jennifer Starzec, Determination

“People who don't see you every day have a hard time understanding how on some days--good days--you can run three miles, but can barely walk across the parking lot on other days,' [my mom] said quietly.”
― Jennifer Starzec, Determination

“I choose not to place "DIS", in my ability.”
― Robert M. Hensel

“The most upsetting thing about Society’s attitude towards disabled people is that many millions of disabled people became disabled while trying to please Society, the very same bitch that secretly regards them as subhuman.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Use and Misuse of Children

“I am conscious of a soul-sense that lifts me above the narrow, cramping circumstances of my life. My physical limitations are forgotten- my world lies upward, the length and the breadth and the sweep of the heavens are mine!”
― Helen Keller, The Story of My Life: With Her Letters (1887 1901) and a Supplementary Account of Her Education Including Passages from the Reports and Letters of Her Teacher Anne Mansfield Sullivan by John Albert Macy

“I've met so many parents of the kids who are on the low end of the autism spectrum, kids who are diametrically opposed to Jacob, with his Asperger's. They tell me I'm lucky to have a son who's verbal, who is blisteringly intelligent, who can take apart the broken microwave and have it working again an hour later. They think there is no greater hell than having a son who is locked in his own world, unaware that there's a wider one to explore. But try having a son who is locked in his own world and still wants to make a connection. A son who tries to be like everyone else but truly doesn't know how.”
― Jodi Picoult, House Rules

“What would happen, they conjectured, if they simply went on assuming their children would do everything. Perhaps not quickly. Perhaps not by the book. But what if they simply erased those growth and development charts, with their precise, constricting points and curves? What if they kept their expectations but erased the time line? What harm could it do? Why not try?”
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“Theres a remarkable amount of strength residing in those who move forward without being able to physically move. Ones that carry the weight of illness or a disability, they battle wars most know nothing about. They are the true warriors of the world, the ones who have every reason to quit but never do.”
― Nikki Rowe

“...the reason is that when we look at nature, we receive a sort of permission to be alive in this world...”
― Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump: the Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism

“Everything is temporary,
almost like a passing fase,
some of laughter
Some of pain.
What we would do,
If we had the chance to explore
What we had taken for
Granted the very day before,
Some would say I'm selfish,
To hold a little sadness in my eyes,
But they don't feel the sorrow
When I can't do,
all that helps me feel alive.
I can express my emotions,
but I can't run wild and free,
My mind and soul would handle it
but hell upon my hip, ankle and knees,
This disorder came about,
as a friendship said its last goodbyes,
Soooo this is what I got given for all the years I stood by?
I finally stand still to question it, life it is in fact?
What the fuck is the purpose of it all if you get stabbed in the back?
And after the anger fills the air, the regret takes it places,
I never wanted to be that girl,
Horrid, sad and faded...
So I took with a grain of salt,
my new found reality,
I am not of my pain,
the disability doesnt define me.
I find away to adjust,
also with the absence of my friend,
I trust the choices I make,
allow my heart to mend.
I pick up the pieces
I retrain my leg,
I find where I left off
And I start all over again,
You see what happens...
When a warrior gets tested;
They grow from the ashes
Powerful and invested.
So I thank all this heartache,
As I put it to a rest,
I move forward with my life
And I'll build a damn good nest.”
― Nikki Rowe

“I will crawl upon my knees just to know the joy of suffering.”
― Sidewalk Prophets

“The world isn't built with a ramp.”
― Walt Balenovich, Travels in a Blue Chair: Alaska to Zambia Ushuaia to Uluru

“Now, Woolf calls her fictional bastion of male privilege Oxbridge, so I'll call mine Yarvard. Even though she cannot attend Yarvard because she is a woman, Judith cheerfully applies for admission at, let's call it, Smithcliff, a prestigious women's college. She is denied admission on the grounds that
the dorms and classrooms can't
accommodate wheelchairs, that her speech pattern would interfere with her elocution lessons, and that her presence would upset the other students. There is also the suggestion that she is not good marriage material for the men at the elite college to which Smithcliff is a bride-supplying "sister school." The letter inquires as to why she hasn't been institutionalized.
When she goes to the administration building to protest the decision, she can't get up the flight of marble steps on the Greek Revival building. This edifice was designed to evoke a connection to the Classical world, which practiced infanticide of disabled newborns.”
― Rosemarie Garland Thomson

“That made love—not grace—the magic ingredient. Then a
new thought hit her. Perhaps love was grace. A shiver went
up her spine. What did that make anger? The antithesis of
grace?”
― Penelope Marzec, A Rush of Light

“It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts. Then it was in the line of human advance that Einhorn could do so much.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“The body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored by countless other bodies.”
― Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

“Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do.”
― Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay

“The lingerie department is the only one that she can reach in her wheelchair. Nevertheless, she is fired the next day because of complaints that a woman who is so obviously not sexually attractive selling alluring nightgowns makes customers uncomfortable. Daunted by her dismissal, she seeks consolation in the arms of the young manager and soon finds herself pregnant. Upon learning
of this news, he leaves her for a
nondisabled woman with a fuller
bustline and better homemaking skills in his inaccessible kitchen.”
― Rosemarie Garland Thomson

“Do not take the world too seriously, nor let too many social conventions oppress you.”
― Randolph Bourne, The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911-1918

“rules”
― Cynthia Lord, Rules

“What's it like here?
There's a biscuit factory next door. We get the broken ones.”
― Hiedi Thomas Jennifer Worth

“In the years since then there has been a gradual change in the climate of ideas with regard to the disabled. It had begun to dawn on the able-bodied world that it is possible to combine an unsatisfactory body with a perfectly satisfactory brain, and a personality at any rate as satisfactory as most other people's. Trailing somewhat behind that, but now beginning to emerge also, is the much more startling idea that the disabled may not only have normal brains and the ability to hold down normal jobs and the wish to join in normal recreations and be accepted for ourselves, just as people, but normal emotions also. That we may have the same emotional needs as anybody else, and the ability to satisfy those needs in each other, or even in the able-bodied.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection

“In these days, doctors know little about autism. They blame it on distant parents who don't communicate enough with their children”
― Pénélope Bagieu, Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World

“there’s nothing worse than seeing pity radiating from the eyes of a former lover.”
― Susannah Cahalan, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness