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" In 'A Likely Story,' I wanted to recreate the events, the mood, and the imagery of my life as a teenager. I was thirty-seven when I wrote it. "

Rosemary Mahoney

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" When sighted people cover their eyes or find themselves in a dark place, this is something that's very terrifying for us. And so in general, we assume that this is what blindness means. But of course, it isn't. For people who were born blind or who go blind at a very young age, that's not at all what blindness means. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" I've rarely met a miserable, self-pitying blind person. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" We are not born with effective vision. The human infant has to learn how to see. The eyes gather information, they transmit it to the brain, but the brain doesn't know how to process it yet. We learn how to see in a way that's very similar to the way we learn how to speak. It takes a couple of years. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" I think the most useful thing you can do as a writer is to reconstruct real life with all its color, hardship, joy, and intrigue. If you're interested in people, you honor them best, I think, by making the fullest possible picture of them. Your subjects may - and from my experience probably will - protest your portrait of them. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" A majority of my blind students at the International Institute for Social Entrepreneurs in Trivandrum, India, a branch of Braille Without Borders, came from the developing world: Madagascar, Colombia, Tibet, Liberia, Ghana, Kenya, Nepal and India. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" I'm not confident, and yet I'm oddly confident. You have to have a certain amount of ego to be a writer in the first place, and to write things that might be controversial. I've wasted a lot of time worrying about it: am I tough enough to do it? Well, I guess, or I wouldn't have done it. The day it's too difficult for me, I guess I'll stop. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" China was not at all what I expected it to be. I had an image of China as a very quaint and mysterious and peaceful place. Well, it's quaint and mysterious in some respects, but not in the ways I had thought. The people are mysterious. They don't often tell you what they feel. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" I think most memoirs, though they purport to be about this particular time or this person you met, are really about the effect that person or time had on you. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" My mother had faith in me, had more faith in me than I had in myself, and knowing that she did made me try to find faith. She believed in trying things. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" I wanted Lillian Hellman to be perfect because I wasn't perfect myself. I really wanted a mentor. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" I, for one, find writing excruciating. Some mornings, as I'm on my way to my desk, my hands actually tremble with fear. The fear, of course, is that I'll sit down at the desk and discover that what I've written is claptrap. Fear inevitably leads to procrastination. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" One of the most persistent misconceptions about blindness is that it is a curse from God for misdeeds perpetrated in a past life, which cloaks the blind person in spiritual darkness and makes him not just dangerous, but evil. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" My mother was not what anyone would call sweet, and she wasn't conventional. When my brother couldn't find his shoes one morning, she said, 'Oh, for God's sake, it won't kill him not to have shoes for a day,' and sent him to school without them. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" Though my grandmother had picked up modern ideas in America, she still had some conflicting 19th-century Irish notions. She believed that daughters, educated though they may be, should continue to live at home until they were married. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" Aversion toward the blind exists for the same reason that most prejudices exist: lack of knowledge. Ignorance is a powerful generator of fear. And fear slides easily into aggression and contempt. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" There's as much revealed in the way a person lifts a glass as in what they say about some political issue. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" My mother had seven children in seven years. No twins. She also had a three-legged beagle who was compelled to bite strangers, a freakishly big double-pawed tomcat who regularly left dead rabbits on the front doorstep, and 70 white mice that one or another of us had smuggled home from my father's research laboratory. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" As a teen-ager I was constantly trying to please people, which I guess is true of all adolescents. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" I fear that my mind would starve and that I might find myself in danger if I had no visual information, that it's chiefly the light, the shapes, the spaces, the colors that I see that compel me to keep moving forward in life and that keep me safe. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" It's rare that I'm able to get to my desk in the morning without stopping halfway there, turning around, and going in the opposite direction because of a pressing need to straighten all the pictures on the walls, floss my teeth a second time, and make certain that there really are 100 postage stamps in the roll of stamps I bought yesterday. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" I'm very curious about the world, foreign cultures. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" When you hear that China is overcrowded, that's an understatement. I was shocked at the number of people. Even in the rural areas. I was also shocked at the poverty and at the living conditions. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" Most of us who have healthy eyesight are extremely attached to our vision, often without being conscious that we are. We depend heavily on our eyes, and yet we rarely give them a second thought. I, at least, am this way. The physical world is almost hyper-vivid to me. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" The first thing the Chinese ask you when they meet you is: 'How much money do you make?' It's a legitimate question to ask in China. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" I am not afraid to die. I simply do not want to. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" Americans generally associate boats with leisure. Vastly less prosperous, Egyptians associate them with nothing but labour. Rowing a boat is something a fisherman is forced to do to make a living; how could such an activity bring me - a woman no less - pleasure? "

Rosemary Mahoney

" To me, the remarkable thing is it's pretty much unanimous the way blind people have been perceived in all cultures and for millennia. The first is, if they can't see, they must be stupid. The second one is, and this is a very old one, that blindness is such a terrible thing that it must be a curse from God for some evil that you committed. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" Writing is not a genteel profession; it's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" I grew up in New England at the edge of the Atlantic and have for many years been an avid rower. I've rowed in various places, including the Ganges in India, the River Shannon in Ireland, and the Sea of Galilee. "

Rosemary Mahoney

" One of the many misconceptions about the blind is that they have greater hearing, sense of smell and sense of touch than sighted people. This is not strictly true. Their blindness simply forces them to recognize gifts they always had but had heretofore largely ignored. "

Rosemary Mahoney