Sarah

“Being able to see; being able to hold a book; being able to turn its page; being able to maintain a reading posture; being able to go to a bookshop to buy a book - I loathed the exclusionary machismo of book culture that demanded that its participants meet these five criteria of able-bodiedness. I loathed, too, the ignorant arrogance of all those self-professed book-lovers so oblivious to their privilege.”
― Saou Ichikawa, Hunchback

“The longer I lived, the more my body collapsed into an ever more aberrant shape. It wasn’t collapsing into death. Rather, it collapsed so as to live, collapsed as a testament to all the time I’d withstood. To live, my body breaks.”
― Saou Ichikawa, Hunchback

“Disabled people were not sexual beings – I had assented to the definition that society had created.”
― Saou Ichikawa, Hunchback

“The prosperity of the community grows from the flow of relationships, not the accumulation of goods. When the natural world is understood as a gift instead of private property, there are ethical constraints on the accumulation of abundance that is not yours to own. Gifts are not meant to be hoarded, and thus made scarce for others, but given away, which generates sufficiency for all.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World