The heart of their [Walsingham Witnesses] religion seemed to lie in disproving the religion of others.
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.
I've rarely met a miserable, self-pitying blind person.
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.
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.
Nobody's perfect, and to try to pretend you're perfect is an exhausting fool's errand.
When I was a senior in high school, I went to Ireland to study Irish Gaelic. And after one semester at Trinity College, I went way out to the west coast of Ireland and rented a little house by myself.
Writing is not a genteel profession; it's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
