Dustin

“People with 4p- shared an absence of something. How could this create a presence of something? How could deletion create addition? It seemed both a mystery and a metaphor . A so-called deficit could surprise you. A so-called deficit could create an attribute.”
― Heather Lanier, Raising a Rare Girl: A Memoir

“How did I ever learn that people like my daughter were less-than? Had the roots of my thinking been planted by the defect language, by the bad seed and at zero language? Had they begun in the hallways of that elementary school I attended? Not quite. The roots of my thinking were older than me. They were older than the neglected buildings that housed people with intellectual disabilities, older than the American laws requiring their sterilization. The roots dug deep into history’s soil, reaching even past the story of Jesus’s disciples, who found a blind man on the side of a road and asked their master, “Who sinned to make this man blind? The man or his parents?” Disability as punishment . Disability as sin. Disability as problem, as outcast, as other. These equations have been graffitied all over human history.”
― Heather Lanier, Raising a Rare Girl: A Memoir

“When we walk, we can walk for our ancestors and future generations. Maybe they had to walk with sorrow; perhaps they were forced to march or migrate. When we walk freely, we are walking for them.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Walk

“Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate