As a teen-ager I was constantly trying to please people, which I guess is true of all adolescents. Rosemary Mahoney Read Quote
One of the most persistent misconceptions about blindness is that it is a curse from God for misdeeds perpetrated in a past life, which cloaks the blind person in spiritual darkness and makes him not just dangerous, but evil. Rosemary Mahoney Read Quote
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. Rosemary Mahoney Read Quote
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. Rosemary Mahoney Read Quote
I’m not confident, and yet I’m oddly confident. You have to have a certain amount of ego to be a writer in the first place, and to write things that might be controversial. I’ve wasted a lot of time worrying about it: am I tough enough to do it? Well, I guess, or I wouldn’t have done it. The day it’s too difficult for me, I guess I’ll stop. Rosemary Mahoney Read Quote
I wanted Lillian Hellman to be perfect because I wasn’t perfect myself. I really wanted a mentor. Rosemary Mahoney Read Quote
My mother had seven children in seven years. No twins. She also had a three-legged beagle who was compelled to bite strangers, a freakishly big double-pawed tomcat who regularly left dead rabbits on the front doorstep, and 70 white mice that one or another of us had smuggled home from my father’s research laboratory. Rosemary Mahoney Read Quote
I am like a security camera ever on the watch. The furtive quality of vision feels to me like an incredibly valuable weapon. Everything I see gets transformed into a private sketch or painting in my mind, stored away for future reference, future evidence, future ammunition. Rosemary Mahoney Read Quote
I think the most useful thing you can do as a writer is to reconstruct real life with all its color, hardship, joy, and intrigue. If you’re interested in people, you honor them best, I think, by making the fullest possible picture of them. Your subjects may – and from my experience probably will – protest your portrait of them. Rosemary Mahoney Read Quote
