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" 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
Money
Meet
China
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" The night sky in Egypt is a swirling mass of stars so bright and numerous the sky seems to tremble with the ice-blue weight of them. "
Rosemary Mahoney
Seems
Sky
Stars
" As a teen-ager I was constantly trying to please people, which I guess is true of all adolescents. "
Rosemary Mahoney
Please
Trying
True
" I wanted Lillian Hellman to be perfect because I wasn't perfect myself. I really wanted a mentor. "
Rosemary Mahoney
Perfect
Really
Because
" A lot of Polish and Russian Jews had this experience: they would emigrate, thinking they were on their way to New York. Then their captains would stop in Dublin and say, 'Everybody off.' They would leave, and by the time they discovered they weren't in America, they didn't have enough money to continue. "
Rosemary Mahoney
Time
Money
New York
" 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
People
True
Smell
" 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
Events
Life
Story
" There's as much revealed in the way a person lifts a glass as in what they say about some political issue. "
Rosemary Mahoney
Way
Person
Say
" I am not afraid to die. I simply do not want to. "
Rosemary Mahoney
Afraid
Am
Die
" If one person in a group of ten is missing the tip of his little finger, I will notice it almost immediately. This extreme attention to visual detail is not a virtue, just a fact of my person. It happens seemingly involuntarily and strikes me as neither good nor bad. "
Rosemary Mahoney
Bad
Attention
Detail
" 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
Research
Home
Mother
" 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
People
You
Best
" 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
People
Peaceful
You
" 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
Fear
Hands
Writing
" 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
People
Me
Evil
" 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
Fear
Light
Myself
" Not one day of my mother's adult life passed without some critical demand on her maternal role, without some urgent response from her. "
Rosemary Mahoney
Life
Her
Day
" 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
Time
Think
Person
" 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
Living
Nothing
Rowing
" I've rarely met a miserable, self-pitying blind person. "
Rosemary Mahoney
Miserable
Person
Rarely
" The Egyptian Nile, though it does have its own particular hazards, is subject to none of what I find in Rhode Island. Since the Aswan High Dam was built in 1973, the Nile has become something of a grand canal. It is wide, flat, slow, and so calm it verges on the geriatric. "
Rosemary Mahoney
Own
Become
Calm
" Nobody's perfect, and to try to pretend you're perfect is an exhausting fool's errand. "
Rosemary Mahoney
You
Pretend
Nobody
" 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
Fear
Knowledge
Powerful
" 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
Sea
India
New
" 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
Vision
Thought
Me
" I was a good student, sort of funny and athletic. I had friends. "
Rosemary Mahoney
Funny
Student
Athletic
" Writing is not a genteel profession; it's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty. "
Rosemary Mahoney
Tough
Writing
Nasty
" 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
Spiritual
Past
Darkness
" 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
Blind
India
World
" 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
Trying
Myself
Faith
" 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
Need
Time
Direction