Lou Ann Walker > Quotes

“The inability to hear is a nuisance; the inability to communicate is the tragedy.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“It is a curious societal comment that the major agencies in New York serving the blind were on the genteel upper East Side or on tree-lined streets in Chelsea. The Society for the Deaf was in a place the police had forsaken.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“My father, she insisted, was not born deaf. “Insisted” because there was an even greater stigma attached to genetic deafness (and the family) than there was to acquired deafness.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“For so long I’d been doing what I’d accused other people of doing—I was seeing the deafness, not the people.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“One story was about a deaf man who was driving in the country, when safety bars were lowered across the road at a railroad crossing. The train passed, but the bars weren’t raised. Finally, the man went to the stationmaster and wrote him a note: “Please but.” That’s the punch line. The joke is that the sign for “but” is the index fingers crossed and then opening up, just the way the bars protecting train tracks do.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“It was like the old joke: the operation was a success but the patient died. Theories and goals of education don’t matter a whit if you don’t consider your students to be human beings.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“Time and again I heard my grandmother Wells say she would give her own hearing to make her daughter “whole.” In her mind, deafness was some kind of divine retribution.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“We don’t sign here, of course. We want to prepare these children to enter the normal world.” She believed that.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“Thomas Hansen, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Hinckley, carried a gun in the trunk of his car, and wrote letters to one of the stars of the musical Annie, pleading with the girl to return his love, warning her to stop drinking (he’d seen a newspaper photo of her next to a bottle of champagne, celebrating her eighteenth birthday), and informing her that he would commit suicide if she didn’t permit him to visit. Hansen had been tracking the girl for six years—since the time she was twelve—following her across the United States.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“By the age of two, hearing children perceived their parents’ deafness well enough to know automatically that they must use gestures with their parents and other deaf people. If the children talked at all, their voices had an unusual quality and they exaggerated their mouth movements. These same children immediately shifted gears, speaking in “normal” voices, with hearing people.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“In fact, an alarming percentage of deaf children graduate high school with a third-grade reading ability.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“I was the only student she’d taught who’d actually known any deaf people. Most of the students in my courses were there because they’d seen a movie or read a Helen Keller book.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“What’s interesting about the studies is that prelingually deaf people (people such as my parents, who were born deaf or who lost their hearing early on) have no interior monologue.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“Somehow it trivialized us, me and my family, making the way we talked into a party game.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“Tell Doris Jean I figure it’s about time I learned that sign language,”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“to leave a child without language for a moment longer than is absolutely necessary seems cruel to me.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“I have talked and listened and heard and there is no me!”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“We were speaking in feelings. Words were not enough.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“Just as there are accents in speech, there are regional accents in sign. People from the South sign slower than people in the North—even people from northern and southern Indiana have different styles.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“The notion that the womb is a silent place is pure fantasy. If a person dives under water, he hears very little because sound is muffled by the cushion of air remaining outside the eardrum. A fetus has no air bubble outside its ear, and water conducts sound better than air.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“This work was throwing me into the intimate functioning of people’s lives.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“My greatest fear had always been: The more you get to know me, the less there is to know.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“Mom turned to me, puzzled. In sign language, she asked, “What was Grandpa saying in the kitchen?” My heart froze.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“there are signs that are parodies of actual objects and that retain a cleverness even for deaf people. Indeed, these signs are to sight what onomatopoeia is to sound.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“But thinking back on all those times, I had this odd, inescapable feeling that society thought it was some kind of sin to be deaf.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“Like virtually all schools for the deaf at that time, the Indiana State School emphasized oral skills: speaking and lipreading.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“Immediately the stranger would bend over toward me and ask, “Does he lip-read?” as if Dad had suddenly become as inanimate as a cigar store Indian.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“no one had ever let them think that initiative was acceptable behavior.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“Over the centuries people have blamed everything from eating a green chestnut to being cursed by a gypsy. Others have cited being frightened by a burglar, consuming improper combinations of food, and thinking and speaking impure thoughts as direct causes of deafness.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

“Looking for a place to live at a time when landlords wouldn’t rent to deaf people and setting up bank accounts when banks often required deaf people to get co-signees just for checking accounts wasn’t going to be easy.”
― Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family