Sheila Black > Quotes

“I can’t write myself except through reading others’ words.”
― Sheila Black, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability

“Friends change toward the ill person, some revealed in their strange and beautiful kindness and some exposed in their utter, ugly selfishness.”
― Sheila Black, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability

“the capacity to engage in pleasurable activity—experiences sought for their own sake, for the stimulation and enjoyment they provide—is assumed to be out of reach of the disabled. This notion is fed by deterministic arguments that accord tremendous weight to disability, in effect saying that it eclipses pleasure, joy, and to an extent, creativity...The humanities and the arts can benefit from an analysis of who in society is believed to be entitled to pleasure and who is thought to have the capacity to provide pleasure.”
― Sheila Black, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability

“a world in which the hospital industrial complex makes “obsolete” different bodies,”
― Sheila Black, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability

“It’s curious that the Latin root of the Middle English word for tradition, tradere, means not only to “impart” and “give over,” but also to “betray.”
― Sheila Black, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability

“Why would anyone write about illness except the ill? And at first, too, the experience is too close for the ill person to be a reliable witness. The mind doesn’t want to write about the body’s condition but to change it, for in dreams the body can still dance!”
― Sheila Black, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability