Paraplegic Quotes

“Some disabled people spend a significant amount of their energy on trying to come across as abled or as not that disabled.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“He placed a pinch of snow on his tongue and thought of making snow ice cream with Frank and their mother when they were small boys - 'First you stir in the vanilla' - Frank standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“a rose for empathy

can my own beauty reflect off glass
again the pain subsides like matted walls
like hospital halls like gas and pills and sass
never can I dance in balls or prance through malls

my pelvic gird’ survives tacked back intact
i sigh relieved my paralysis stops
there died before my eyes the drunk in fact
who crashed and thrashed and mashed in flee of cops

by grace i stay a higher vertebrate
in this ordered peck of vine and line still mine
my skin and brain remain not celibate
those organs large and whole and sexed and fine

the drunk fared worse in life in death in time
my paraplegia dared curse his crime not mine”
― Miles Garrett

“I take a stroll through the mall every day, and every day I see people taking paraplegic family members out for a window-shopping excursion and paletas, and against the backdrop of of loud club beats it makes me sad. I'm just this sad bitch.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans