“What if in my waking hours a sound should ring through the silent halls of hearing? ... Would the bow and string tension of life snap? Would the heart over weighted with sudden joy stop beating for very excess of happiness?”

“I have walked with people whose eyes are full of light but who see nothing in sea or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in books. It were far better to sail forever in the night of blindness with sense, and feeling, and mind, than to be content with the mere act of seeing. The only lightless dark is the night of darkness in ignorance and insensibility.”

“Gullibility is the key to all adventures. The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he who gets the most out of life.”

“So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me 'arch priestess of the sightless,' 'wonder woman,' and a 'modern miracle.' But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics-that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world-that is a different matter!”

“I am a child of my generation, and I rejoice that I live in such splendidly disturbing times.”

“Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.”

“He that commends me to mine own content Commends me to the thing I cannot get. I to the world am like a drop of water That in the ocean seeks another drop, Who, falling there to find his fellow forth, Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself: So I, to find a mother and a brother, In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.”

“When I was at home I was in a better place”