Rosemary Mahoney

“The Egyptian Nile, though it does have its own particular hazards, is subject to none of what I find in Rhode Island. Since the Aswan High Dam was built in 1973, the Nile has become something of a grand canal. It is wide, flat, slow, and so calm it verges on the geriatric.”

“To me, the remarkable thing is it's pretty much unanimous the way blind people have been perceived in all cultures and for millennia. The first is, if they can't see, they must be stupid. The second one is, and this is a very old one, that blindness is such a terrible thing that it must be a curse from God for some evil that you committed.”

“It's rare that I'm able to get to my desk in the morning without stopping halfway there, turning around, and going in the opposite direction because of a pressing need to straighten all the pictures on the walls, floss my teeth a second time, and make certain that there really are 100 postage stamps in the roll of stamps I bought yesterday.”

“Aversion toward the blind exists for the same reason that most prejudices exist: lack of knowledge. Ignorance is a powerful generator of fear. And fear slides easily into aggression and contempt.”

“We always think, 'Well, for a person who's blind, it must be an amazing, joyful miracle if by some chance their sight is restored to them.' Now, this may be true for blind people who lost their vision at a later age. It's rarely true for people who were born blind or who go blind at a very young age.”

“My mother had faith in me, had more faith in me than I had in myself, and knowing that she did made me try to find faith. She believed in trying things.”

“Writing is not a genteel profession; it's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.”

“I'm very curious about the world, foreign cultures.”

“A lot of Polish and Russian Jews had this experience: they would emigrate, thinking they were on their way to New York. Then their captains would stop in Dublin and say, 'Everybody off.' They would leave, and by the time they discovered they weren't in America, they didn't have enough money to continue.”

“I am not afraid to die. I simply do not want to.”

“There's as much revealed in the way a person lifts a glass as in what they say about some political issue.”

“In 'A Likely Story,' I wanted to recreate the events, the mood, and the imagery of my life as a teenager. I was thirty-seven when I wrote it.”

“A majority of my blind students at the International Institute for Social Entrepreneurs in Trivandrum, India, a branch of Braille Without Borders, came from the developing world: Madagascar, Colombia, Tibet, Liberia, Ghana, Kenya, Nepal and India.”

“I was a good student, sort of funny and athletic. I had friends.”

“I grew up in New England at the edge of the Atlantic and have for many years been an avid rower. I've rowed in various places, including the Ganges in India, the River Shannon in Ireland, and the Sea of Galilee.”

“One of the many misconceptions about the blind is that they have greater hearing, sense of smell and sense of touch than sighted people. This is not strictly true. Their blindness simply forces them to recognize gifts they always had but had heretofore largely ignored.”

“Not one day of my mother's adult life passed without some critical demand on her maternal role, without some urgent response from her.”

“The first thing the Chinese ask you when they meet you is: 'How much money do you make?' It's a legitimate question to ask in China.”

“My mother was not what anyone would call sweet, and she wasn't conventional. When my brother couldn't find his shoes one morning, she said, 'Oh, for God's sake, it won't kill him not to have shoes for a day,' and sent him to school without them.”

“Though my grandmother had picked up modern ideas in America, she still had some conflicting 19th-century Irish notions. She believed that daughters, educated though they may be, should continue to live at home until they were married.”