#blindness

He was so tenacious he defied the distraction of women by refusing to have them in his presence, just as later in life he denied his blindness by calling for more and more candles. ↗

— Kit Williams

#calling #candles #defied #denied #distraction

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all. ↗

— Barbara Kingsolver

#blindness #could #exist #lose #might

When life's got you down, keep your head up... you can't see the ground anyway ↗

— Nicole Rae

#blindness #humor #inspirational #motivational #visual-impairment

I am unjust, but I can strive for justice. My life's unkind, but I can vote for kindness. I, the unloving, say life should be lovely. I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness. ↗

— Vachel Lindsay

#am #blind #blindness #cry #i

We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought. ↗

— Oliver Sacks

#cognition #communication #community #senses #sociality

They say that right before you die your whole life flashes before you – a medley of your own personal greatest hits. Well then, I must be about to live, because events that haven’t happened yet are constantly pushing themselves into my head. ↗

— Emlyn Chand

#fiction #paranormal #psychic-powers #ya #yalit

We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen. -Orrec- ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#choice #ears #eyes #life

There had been no crises of incident, or marked movements of experience such as in Felipe's imaginations of love were essential to the fulness of its growth. This is a common mistake on the part of those who have never felt love's true bonds. Once in those chains, one perceives that they are not of the sort full forged in a day. They are made as the great iron cables are made, on which bridges are swung across the widest water-channels,--not of single huge rods, or bars, which would be stronger, perhaps, to look at; but myriads of the finest wires, each one by itself so fine, so frail, it would barely hold a child's kite in the wind: by hundreds, hundreds of thousands of such, twisted, re-twisted together, are made the mighty cables, which do not any more swerve from their place in the air, under the weight and jar of the ceaseless traffic and tread of two cities, than the solid earth swerves under the same ceaseless weight and jar. Such cables do not break. ↗

— Helen Hunt Jackson

#blindness #california #female-author #helen-hunt-jackson #history

A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#essay #art

Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ...each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition-- all such distortions within our own egos-- condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other's naked hearts. ↗

— Tennessee Williams

#ego #fear #heart #life #love