28+ Nancy Mairs Quotes On Disability, Racism And Being A Cripple

Nancy Mairs is an American author who is known for her memoirs and essays on disability and gender. She has written books such as Waist-High in the World, Remembering the Bone House, and Plaintext. Her work has been widely praised for its frankness and insight into the challenges of living with a disability. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Nancy Mairs on disability, racism, love.

Top 10 Nancy Mairs Quotes

1. My writing arises out of erotic impulse toward an other: it is an act of love. And I want terribly to be loved in return, as a sign that I have loved well enough.
2. I will write myself into well-being.
3. Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions.
4. That's the trouble with honorable mentions: they let everyone know you applied and didn't win.
5. A line, once crossed, can never be uncrossed.
6. physical disability looms pretty large in one's life. But it doesn't devour one wholly. I'm not, for instance, Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease.
7. The fact is that ours is the only minority you can join involuntarily, without warning, at any time. And if you live long enough, as you're increasingly likely to do, you may well join it.
8. If only we could have them back as babies today, now that we have some idea what to do with them.
9. One of the blessings that comes with parental territory is that children tug you into experiences you're pretty sure you'd never otherwise contemplate.
10. Who one believes God to be is most accurately revealed not in any credo but in the way one speaks to God when no one else is listening.

Nancy Mairs Short Quotes

• Writing is not, alas, like riding a bicycle: it does not get easier with practice.
• God enters the world through those of us who are willing to let God participate fully in our lives.
• In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.
• our lives are stories we tell ourselves.
• You don't have to want death in order to prepare for it.

Nancy Mairs Famous Quotes And Sayings

God is no White Knight who charges into the world to pluck us like distressed damsels from the jaws of dragons, or diseases. God chooses to become present to and through us. It is up to us to rescue one another. — Nancy Mairs

people who seem most hostile to my presence are those most fearful of my fate. And since their fear keeps them emotionally distant from me, they are the ones least likely to learn that my life isn't half so dismal as they assume. — Nancy Mairs

From the moment of birth, at every level, human beings who are more alike than different become polarized into two absolutely exclusive classes with very different and ill-distributed symbolic powers. — Nancy Mairs

In a society that prates about, but seldom practices, communication, the craving to be listened to, heard, understood - which originates with the first terrified wail, the circling arms, the breast, the consolatory murmur - is hard to assuage. — Nancy Mairs

no one expects all impediments to be miraculously whisked away. In insisting that others view our lives as ample and precious, we are not demanding that they be made perfect. ... If it is both possible and pleasant for me and my kind to enter, the world will become a livelier place. You'll see. — Nancy Mairs

If the very thought of taking off all your clothes in the middle of the Washington Mall during a school holiday makes you blush, you haven't even begun to dream what it feels like to publish a book. — Nancy Mairs

To view your life as blessed does not require you to deny your pain. It simply demands a more complicated vision, one in which a condition or event is not either good or bad but is, rather, both good and bad, not sequentially, but simultaneously. — Nancy Mairs

Do others, I wondered, "see things as I do? I do not think so, for if they did they would not still be alive." And, life-threatening though my vision seemed, I would not repudiate it: "Sometimes I think I shall die from being different even as I cling to the difference fiercely." — Nancy Mairs

Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can't love what we won't experience. — Nancy Mairs

Weddings in our society seem designed to reduce the bride and groom to precisely the condition of those who, because they 'lack sufficient use of reason,' are 'incapable of contracting marriage,' according to canon law. — Nancy Mairs

Out of the new arrivals in our lives--the odd word stumbled upon in a difficult text, the handsome black stranger who bursts in one night through the cat door, the telephone call out of a friend's silence of years, the sudden greeting from the girl-child---we constantly make of ourselves our selves. — Nancy Mairs

I felt permanently exiled from 'normality.' Whether imposed by self or society, this outsider status - and not the disability itself - constitutes the most daunting barrier for most people with physical impairments, because it, even more than flights of steps or elevators without braille, prevents them from participating fully in the ordinary world, where most of life's satisfactions dwell. — Nancy Mairs

This kind of split makes me crazy, this territorializing of the holy. Here God may dwell. Here God may not dwell. It contradicts everything in my experience, which says: God dwells where I dwell. Period. — Nancy Mairs

Life Lessons by Nancy Mairs

1. Nancy Mairs' work emphasizes the importance of self-acceptance and self-love, no matter the physical or mental challenges one may face.
2. She also highlights the need to be an advocate for oneself and to speak out against the injustices and oppression faced by marginalized communities.
3. Finally, Mairs' work encourages us to be mindful of our privilege and to use it to help those who are less fortunate.