Rosemary Mahoney
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
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
Rosemary Mahoney

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

Rosemary Mahoney
Rosemary Mahoney

Nobody's perfect, and to try to pretend you're perfect is an exhausting fool's errand.

Rosemary Mahoney
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
Rosemary Mahoney

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

Rosemary Mahoney
Rosemary Mahoney

We always think, 'Well, for a person who's blind, it must be an amazing, joyful miracle if by some chance their sight is restored to them.' Now, this may be true for blind people who lost their vision at a later age. It's rarely true for people who were born blind or who go blind at a very young age.

Rosemary Mahoney
Rosemary Mahoney

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
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
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
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
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
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
Rosemary Mahoney

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
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
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
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
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
Rosemary Mahoney

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

Rosemary Mahoney
Rosemary Mahoney

I was a good student, sort of funny and athletic. I had friends.