Top 33 Rosemary Mahoney Quotes
#1. China was not at all what I expected it to be. I had an image of China as a very quaint and mysterious and peaceful place. Well, it's quaint and mysterious in some respects, but not in the ways I had thought. The people are mysterious. They don't often tell you what they feel.
Rosemary Mahoney
#2. 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.
Rosemary Mahoney
#3. Not one day of my mother's adult life passed without some critical demand on her maternal role, without some urgent response from her.
Rosemary Mahoney
#4. 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.
Rosemary Mahoney
#5. There's as much revealed in the way a person lifts a glass as in what they say about some political issue.
Rosemary Mahoney
#6. 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
#7. I was a good student, sort of funny and athletic. I had friends.
Rosemary Mahoney
#8. Americans generally associate boats with leisure. Vastly less prosperous, Egyptians associate them with nothing but labour. Rowing a boat is something a fisherman is forced to do to make a living; how could such an activity bring me - a woman no less - pleasure?
Rosemary Mahoney
#9. Nobody's perfect, and to try to pretend you're perfect is an exhausting fool's errand.
Rosemary Mahoney
#10. I wanted Lillian Hellman to be perfect because I wasn't perfect myself. I really wanted a mentor.
Rosemary Mahoney
#11. If one person in a group of ten is missing the tip of his little finger, I will notice it almost immediately. This extreme attention to visual detail is not a virtue, just a fact of my person. It happens seemingly involuntarily and strikes me as neither good nor bad.
Rosemary Mahoney
#12. 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
#14. 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.
Rosemary Mahoney
#15. 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.
Rosemary Mahoney
#16. Most of us who have healthy eyesight are extremely attached to our vision, often without being conscious that we are. We depend heavily on our eyes, and yet we rarely give them a second thought. I, at least, am this way. The physical world is almost hyper-vivid to me.
Rosemary Mahoney
#17. I fear that my mind would starve and that I might find myself in danger if I had no visual information, that it's chiefly the light, the shapes, the spaces, the colors that I see that compel me to keep moving forward in life and that keep me safe.
Rosemary Mahoney
#18. 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.
Rosemary Mahoney
#19. As a teen-ager I was constantly trying to please people, which I guess is true of all adolescents.
Rosemary Mahoney
#20. 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
#21. The heart of their [Walsingham Witnesses] religion seemed to lie in disproving the religion of others.
Rosemary Mahoney
#22. Sight is a slick and overbearing autocrat, trumpeting its prodigal knowledge and perceptions so forcefully that it drowns out the other, subtler senses.
Rosemary Mahoney
#23. I think most memoirs, though they purport to be about this particular time or this person you met, are really about the effect that person or time had on you.
Rosemary Mahoney
#24. 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.
Rosemary Mahoney
#25. When I was a senior in high school, I went to Ireland to study Irish Gaelic. And after one semester at Trinity College, I went way out to the west coast of Ireland and rented a little house by myself.
Rosemary Mahoney
#26. I, for one, find writing excruciating. Some mornings, as I'm on my way to my desk, my hands actually tremble with fear. The fear, of course, is that I'll sit down at the desk and discover that what I've written is claptrap. Fear inevitably leads to procrastination.
Rosemary Mahoney
#27. 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.
Rosemary Mahoney
#28. The night sky in Egypt is a swirling mass of stars so bright and numerous the sky seems to tremble with the ice-blue weight of them.
Rosemary Mahoney
#29. 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.
Rosemary Mahoney
#30. When you hear that China is overcrowded, that's an understatement. I was shocked at the number of people. Even in the rural areas. I was also shocked at the poverty and at the living conditions.
Rosemary Mahoney
#31. Writing is not a genteel profession; it's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.
Rosemary Mahoney
#33. 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.
Rosemary Mahoney
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