Physical Disability Quotes

Whether you're gay or straight, with a physical disability, your skin's a different color, it's absurd in this age to not be aware and be concerned of the inequity in rights. ~ Carson Kressley

The stereotype of the supercrip, in the eyes of its critics, represents a sort of overachieving, overdetermined self-enfreakment that distracts from the lived daily reality of most disabled people. ~ Jose Alaniz

Schizo. It didn't matter how many times Dr. Gill compared it to a disease or physical disability, it wasn't the same thing. It just wasn't. I had schizophrenia. If I saw two guys on the sidewalk, one in a wheelchair and one talking talking to himself, which would I rush to open a door for, and which would I cross the road to avoid? ~ Kelley Armstrong

Not being able to talk sucks. There's no doubt about that. There's a lot of times when I almost feel like I'm trapped inside of myself. Like if I don't talk or yell or scream or laugh I'm going to explode. A lot of the time it almost feels like I'm suffocating. ~ Keary Taylor

I discovered early that the hardest thing to overcome is not a physical disability but the mental condition which it induces. The world, I found, has a way of taking a man pretty much at his own rating. If he permits his loss to make him embarrassed and apologetic, he will draw embarrassment from others. But if he gains his own respect, the respect of those around him comes easily. ~ Alexander P. De Seversky

With emancipation comes the opening up of new possibilities for challenging assumptions over women's appearance and, more radically, the gender order itself. Ventura (She-Thing) comes not only to accept her new "intragender" status but to see it as advantageous -- for dealing with her misandry, for personal growth, and even for becoming a person capable of giving and accepting love. ~ Jose Alaniz

If you are disabled, it is probably not your fault, but it is no good blaming the world or expecting it to take pity on you. One has to have a positive attitude and must make the best of the situation that one finds oneself in; if one is physically disabled, one cannot afford to be psychologically disabled as well. In my opinion, one should concentrate on activities in which one's physical disability will not present a serious handicap. I am afraid that Olympic Games for the disabled do not appeal to me, but it is easy for me to say that because I never liked athletics anyway. On the other hand, science is a very good area for disabled people because it goes on mainly in the mind. Of course, most kinds of experimental work are probably ruled out for most such people, but theoretical work is almost ideal. My disabilities have not been a significant handicap in my field, which is theoretical physics. Indeed, they have helped me in a way by shielding me from lecturing and administrative work that I would otherwise have been involved in. I have managed, however, only because of the large amount of help I have received from my wife, children, colleagues and students. I find that people in general are very ready to help, but you should encourage them to feel that their efforts to aid you are worthwhile by doing as well as you possibly can. ~ Stephen Hawking

We hear things like "we elected a black president," as if that event was the magic eraser to wipe away all of the racial problems in our country in one fell swoop.
But that would be like saying that in 1932, we elected a president with a physical disability, so we should stop building ramps and having reserved handicap spaces because that's reverse discrimination against the able-bodied ~ Simon S. Tam

The multiverse model offers an elegantly postmodern solution to character stasis in a market-driven serial publishing system which privileges constancy over major change. ~ Jose Alaniz

It takes a special reader to experience a special book, and allow the inspiration, inevitable in the process, to move him to action. ~ Cameile Graham

Power is tricky to navigate; to understand it you have to lay the groundwork for what makes you powerful in the first place. ~ Keah Brown

My outlines can be 10-20 pages in length and focus primarily on the physical active plot over the emotional plot. ~ Tony DiTerlizzi

Remember your created limits. So much of workaholism is a defiance of the physical limitations that God our creator has imposed upon us. ~ Tim Challies

Physical intimacy is easy. Emotional intimacy is hard. ~ Hannah Simone

Every one has a sum of physical and moral suffering to pay, and whoever does not settle it here below, defrays it after death; happiness is only lent, and must be repaid; its very phantoms are like duties paid in advance on a future succession of sorrows. ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

In your teens, you get the physical puberty, and between 28 and 32, mental puberty. It does make you feel differently. ~ Kate Bush

In medicine, we have invented an entirely new healing paradigm. Now we no longer simply look to the doctor and to medicine to heal us. We now recognize what has been substantiated scientifically everywhere from Harvard to Duke to Stanford - that the power of the mental and spiritual consciousness of the patient is as significant in healing as physical factors are. If we apply that same paradigm to politics, we see that the mind and the spiritual consciousness of the citizen are every bit as important as anything that goes on in the government. ~ Marianne Williamson

Man as Atman is really free; as man he is bound, changed by every physical condition. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Thoughts and emotions cannot be photographed, despite the protestations of some mystically minded portraitists. Physical fact is ultimately the sole pictorial material. ~ William Mortensen

The first typical adolescent of modern times was Wagner's Siegfried. : the music of Siegfried expressed for the first time that combination of (provisional) purity, physical strength, naturism, spontaneity and joie de vivre which was to make the adolescent the hero of our twentieth century, the century of adolescence. ~ Philippe Aries

But I loved doing the physical stuff for 'Dredd.' I have to give a shout-out to the stunt team that I worked with. ~ Olivia Thirlby

Our success already exists on a spiritual level; it's a matter of pulling it into the physical world. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

It is in the vision of the physical eyes
That no invisible or secret thing exists.
But when the eye is turned toward the Light of God
What thing could remain hidden under such Light? ~ Meghan Nuttall Sayres

Human beings have a fundamental need for physical and emotional space, and the desire to extinguish another life can arise when the boundaries of that space are violated. ~ Kanae Minato

It now transpired that the man in front of her didn't actually have a ticket at all, and the argument then began to range freely and angrily over such topics as the physical appearance of the airline check-in girl, her qualities as a person, theories about her ancestors, speculations as to what surprises the future might have in store for her and the airline for which she worked, and finally lit by chance on the happy subject of the man's credit card. He didn't have one. ~ Douglas Adams

I'm an evangelist for the idea of being ultrafit if you want to be the best of breed. Getting into world-class physical condition is one of the smartest moves you can make. ~ Robin S. Sharma

Systems are complex, so controlling an attack and achieving a desired level of damage may be harder than using physical weapons. ~ Dorothy Denning

I love bookshelves, and stacks of books, spines, typography, and the feel of pages between my fingertips. I love bookmarks, and old bindings, and stars in margins next to beautiful passages. I love exuberant underlinings that recall to me a swoon of language-love from a long-ago reading, something I hoped to remember. I love book plates, and inscriptions in gifts from loved ones, I love author signatures, and I love books sitting around reminding me of them, being present in my life, being. I love books. Not just for what they contain. I love them as objects too, as ever-present reminders of what they contain, and because they are beautiful. They are one of my favorite things in life, really at the tiptop of the list, easily my favorite inanimate things in existence, and ... I am just not cottoning on to this idea of making them ... not exist anymore. Making them cease to take up space in the world, in my life? No, please do not take away the physical reality of my books. ~ Laini Taylor

An artist is a provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It's this in-between that I'm calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one. That is the realm of the artist. ~ Federico Fellini

Beauty always represents an inward and inexhaustible equilibrium of forces; and this overwhelms our soul, since it can neither be calculated nor mechanically produced. A sense of beauty can therefore permit us the direct experience of relationships before we can perceive them, in a differentiated manner, with our discursive reason; in this, incidentally, there is a defence for our own physical and psychic well-being, something that we cannot neglect with impunity. ~ Titus Burckhardt

[To learn] is to harness Nature; to spare man all that is most physical, backbreaking, and brutish in the work of production; to make mind master over matter. ~ Frederic Bastiat

During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. Before fleeing their homeland, they had witnessed the atrocities for which the Khmer Rouge, which had been in power from 1975 to 1979, was well known. Many of the women had been raped or tortured or otherwise brutalized. Most had seen family members murdered in front of them. One woman, who never again saw her husband and three children after soldiers came and took them away, said that she had lost her sight after having cried every day for four years. She was not the only one who appeared to have cried herself blind. Others suffered from blurred or partial vision, their eyes troubled by shadows and pains.

The doctors examined the women - about a hundred and fifty in all - found that their eyes were normal. Further tests showed that their brains were normal as well. If the women were telling the truth - and there were some who doubted this, who thought the women might be malingering because they wanted attention or were hoping to collect disability - the only explanation was psychosomatic blindness.

In other words, the women's minds, forced to take in so much horror and unable to take more, had managed to turn out the lights. ~ Sigrid Nunez

Inevitably I came to associate any wine I met with a specific place and a particular slant of history. I learned to perceive more than could be deduced from an analysis of the physical elements in the glass. For me, an important part of the pleasure of wine is its reflection of the total environment that produced it. If I find in a wine no hint of where it was grown, no mark of the summer when the fruit ripened, and no indication of the usages common among those who made it, I am frustrated and disappointed. Because that is what a good, honest wine should offer. ~ Gerald Asher

How many mental health problems, from drug addiction to self-injurious behavior, start as attempts to cope with the unbearable physical pain of our emotions? If Darwin was right, the solution requires finding ways to help people alter the inner sensory landscape of their bodies. Until recently, this bidirectional communication between body and mind was largely ignored by Western science, even as it had long been central to traditional healing practices in many other parts of the world, notably in India and China. Today it is transforming our understanding of trauma and recovery. ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

The kid, whose existence became a hallucination at seven, and a catastrophe at fourteen, and a disaster after that, whose vocation is to be neither a waitress nor a hooker nor a farmer nor a janitor, but forever the stepdaughter to a lascivious stepfather and the undefended offspring of a self-obsessed mother, the kid, who mistrusts everyone, sees the con in everyone and yet is protected against nothing, whose capacity to hold on unintimidated is enormous, and yet whose purchase on life is minute, misfortune's favorite embattled child, the kid to whom everything loathsome that can happen has happened and whose luck shows no sign of changing and yet who excites and arouses him like nobody since Steena, not the most but morally speaking the least repellant person he knows, the one to whom he feels drawn because of having been aimed for so long in the opposite direction, because of all he has missed by going in the opposite direction, and because the underlying feeling of rightness that controlled him formerly is exactly what is propelling him now, the unlikely intimate with whom he shares no less a spiritual than a physical union, who is anything but a plaything, upon whom he flings his body twice a week in order to sustain his animal nature, who is more to him like a comrade in arms than anyone else on earth. ~ Philip Roth

Those societies in which seriousness, tradition, conformity and adherence to long-established - often god-prescribed - ways of doing things are the strictly enforced rule, have always been the majority across time and throughout the world. Such people are not known for their sense of humour and lightness of touch; they rarely break a smile. To them, change is always suspect and usually damnable, and they hardly ever contribute to human development. By contrast, social, artistic and scientific progress as well as technological advance are most evident where the ruling culture and ideology give men and women permission to play, whether with ideas, beliefs, principles or materials. And where playful science changes people's understanding of the way the physical world works, political change, even revolution, is rarely far behind. ~ Paul Kriwaczek

Jon glowed for me then like a plum in sunlight, richly coloured, perfect in form. I would lie in bed beside him or sit at the kitchen table, running my eyes over him like hands. My adoration was physical, and wordless. I would think, Ah, nothing more. Like a breath breathed out. Or I would think, like a child, Mine. Knowing it wasn't true. Stay that way, I would think. But he could not. ~ Margaret Atwood

But because humans are intensely social animals, they also faced a recurring set of crucial social evolutionary challenges. These evolutionary challenges include (1) evading physical harm, (2) avoiding disease, (3) making friends, (4) gaining status, (5) attracting a mate, (6) keeping that mate, and (7) caring for family. ~ Vladas Griskevicius

There's a lot of scientific evidence demonstrating that focused attention leads to the reshaping of the brain. In animals rewarded for noticing sound (to hunt or to avoid being hunted, for example), we find much larger auditory centers in the brain. In animals rewarded for sharp eyesight, the visual areas are larger. Brain scans of violinists provide more evidence, showing dramatic growth and expansion in regions of the cortex that represent the left hand, which has to finger the strings precisely, often at very high speed. Other studies have shown that the hippocampus, which is vital for spatial memory, is enlarged in taxi drivers. The point is that the physical architecture of the brain changes according to where we direct our attention and what we practice doing. ~ Daniel J. Siegel

Fasting is meant to take you, temporarily, out of the realm of the physical and focus your attention heavenward; as one Jewish guide to fasting puts it, 'at the heart of this practice is a desire to shift our attention away from our immediate needs and to focus on more spiritual concerns. ~ Lauren F. Winner

You can awaken the energy worker in you; you can become an energy worker. Such a person uses his or her body to clear, balance and harmonize the unseen energies of the Universe. Those energies come from beyond the third dimension and use the physical body as the instrument through which to facilitate the greatest good for the greatest number of beings and the planet. ~ Elaine Seiler