Quotes by Rosemary Mahoney - Page 1

I'm very curious about the world, foreign cultures.
Rosemary Mahoney / Fiction Writer
Cultures
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I've rarely met a miserable, self-pitying blind person.
Rosemary Mahoney / Fiction Writer
Blind
Blind Person
Miserable
Self
Rarely
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I was a good student, sort of funny and athletic. I had friends.
Rosemary Mahoney / Fiction Writer
Athletic
Good Students
Students
Good Student
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Writing is not a genteel profession. It's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.
Rosemary Mahoney / Fiction Writer
Dirty
Nasty
Writing
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Writing is not a genteel profession; it's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.
Rosemary Mahoney / Fiction Writer
Dirty
Nasty
Profession
Genteel
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Nobody's perfect, and to try to pretend you're perfect is an exhausting fool's errand.
Rosemary Mahoney / Fiction Writer
Exhausting
Fool
Perfect
Try
Nobody
Pretend
Errand
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As a teen-ager I was constantly trying to please people, which I guess is true of all adolescents.
Rosemary Mahoney / Fiction Writer
Please
Adolescent
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The heart of their [Walsingham Witnesses] religion seemed to lie in disproving the religion of others.
Rosemary Mahoney / Fiction Writer
Heart
Lying
Witness
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There's as much revealed in the way a person lifts a glass as in what they say about some political issue.
Rosemary Mahoney / Fiction Writer
Lifts
Glass
Revealed
They Say
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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 / Fiction Writer
Egypt
Mass
Night
Seems
Sky
Stars
Weight
Sky Stars Night
Bright
Numerous
Tremble
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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 / Fiction Writer
Chinese
First Thing
How Much Money
The First Thing
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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 / Fiction Writer
Critical
Demand
Response
Urgent
Adult Life
Life Day One Day
Maternal
Passed
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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 / Fiction Writer
Imagery
Mood
Life My Life Story
Recreate
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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 / Fiction Writer
Perception
Sight
Slick
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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 / Fiction Writer
Faith
Myself Mother Me
Believed
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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 / Fiction Writer
Memoir
Mets
Thinking
Effect
Memoirs
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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 / Fiction Writer
China
Conditions
Living Conditions
Poverty
Rural Areas
Shocked
Understatement
Overcrowded
Rural
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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 / Fiction Writer
Aggression
Aversion
Blind
Contempt
Generator
Ignorance
Slides
Exists
Prejudices
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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 / Fiction Writer
Gaelic
Ireland
Semester
Senior
Trinity
West Coast
Myself Way School
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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 / Fiction Writer
Avid
Ireland
New England
Sea
Atlantic
Edge
River
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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 / Fiction Writer
Blind
Blind Person
Curse
Past Life
Misconceptions
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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 / Fiction Writer
Daughters
Conflicting
Notions
Picked
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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 / Fiction Writer
Conventional
Sake
One Morning
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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 / Fiction Writer
Color
Danger
Information
Light
Might
Moving
Moving Forward
Safe
Shapes
Visual
Chiefly
Colors
Compel
Forward
Spaces
Starve
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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 / Fiction Writer
Blind
Borders
Braille
Colombia
Developing
Ghana
Institute
Majority
Nepal
Tibet
Developing World
Entrepreneurs
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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 / Fiction Writer
Activity
Boat
Fisherman
Labour
Leisure
Prosperous
Rowing
Associate
Egyptians
Forced
Vastly
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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 / Fiction Writer
Morning
Procrastination
Writing
Desk
Discover
Excruciating
Inevitably
Leads
Mornings
Tremble
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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 / Fiction Writer
Missing
Strikes
Virtue
Visual
Good Me Bad
Extreme
Detail
Finger
Immediately
Neither
Notice
Seemingly
Tip
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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 / Fiction Writer
Conscious
Eyesight
Vision
Eyes World Me
Attached
Depend
Extremely
Physical
Physical World
Rarely
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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 / Fiction Writer
Blind
Blindness
Hearing
Ignored
Smell
Forces
Gifts
Largely
Misconceptions
Strictly
Recognize
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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 / Fiction Writer
Calm
Egyptian
Hazards
Nile
Rhode Island
Wide
Canal
Dam
Geriatric
Island
Grand
Slow
Rhode
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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 / Fiction Writer
Quality
Ammunition
Evidence
Feels
Painting
Security
Transformed
Valuable
Vision
Away
Camera
Watch
Gets
Incredibly
Weapon
Private
Reference
Sketch
Stored
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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 / Fiction Writer
Mysterious
Peaceful
Quaint
People Feel Place
Respects
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We are not born with effective vision. The human infant has to learn how to see. The eyes gather information, they transmit it to the brain, but the brain doesn't know how to process it yet. We learn how to see in a way that's very similar to the way we learn how to speak. It takes a couple of years.
Rosemary Mahoney / Fiction Writer
Infant
Transmit
Effective
Gather
Similar
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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.
Rosemary Mahoney / Fiction Writer
Blind
Joyful
Sight
Young Age
Be True
Rarely
Restored
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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 / Fiction Writer
New York
Dublin
Time Experience Money
By The Time
Discovered
Emigrate
Leave
Enough Money
Jews
York
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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 / Fiction Writer
Compelled
Doorstep
Laboratory
Mice
Rabbits
Twins
Home Mother Father
Bite
Home Father Children
Regularly
Strangers
Smuggled
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When sighted people cover their eyes or find themselves in a dark place, this is something that's very terrifying for us. And so in general, we assume that this is what blindness means. But of course, it isn't. For people who were born blind or who go blind at a very young age, that's not at all what blindness means.
Rosemary Mahoney / Fiction Writer
Blind
Blindness
Young Age
Assume
Cover
Dark Place
Terrifying
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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 / Fiction Writer
Hardship
Honor
Intrigue
Protest
Real Life
Subjects
Life Best Experience
Useful
Fullest
Portrait
Reconstruct
Useful Thing
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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.
Rosemary Mahoney / Fiction Writer
Blind
Blindness
Committed
Curse
Remarkable
Cultures
Millennia
Old One
Perceived
Terrible Thing
Unanimous
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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.
Rosemary Mahoney / Fiction Writer
Halfway
Postage
Stamps
Stopping
Teeth
Yesterday
Opposite
Bought
Rare
Turning
Desk
Opposite Direction
Pressing
Straighten
Walls
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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 / Fiction Writer
Controversial
Time Me Day
Confident
Time Enough Done
First Place
Wasted
Oddly
Worrying
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Rosemary Mahoney Quotes - Page 1

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