Loving Our Own Bones Quotes

“When we keep a practice regularly, when we let it work its way into our body and our bones, the physicality itself can be a door. Sometimes my hands can lead me when my heart is closed. Sometimes the gesture is enough to guide me home.”
― Julia Watts Belser, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole

“I’ve come to associate disability with a particular kind of beauty: intricate, complex, and visually satisfying.”
― Julia Watts Belser, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole

“Acquiring a disability or experiencing significant disability change often means a period of adjustment, a period of devising new ways of being in the world.”
― Julia Watts Belser, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole

“Drawn into distance through the prism of the gaze, I keep company with wild places. I allow the land to take up residence within my bones. To behold is to invite in.”
― Julia Watts Belser, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole

“So many of us have learned to use our work as a salve against the fear that we are not enough.”
― Julia Watts Belser, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole

“We live in a world that generally assumes everyone is nondisabled unless otherwise marked, a posture that means disabled people have to do the work and invest the energy to disrupt those expectations.”
― Julia Watts Belser, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole

“For Isaiah, liberation happens through the erasure of disability. It requires the transformation of our bodies and minds so they match a nondisabled norm. But Isaiah’s dream is not my own. It reminds me of a story I heard from Rabbi Margaret Moers Wenig, about a Deaf child in her religious school. A teacher once promised that child, “One day, in the world to come, you’ll be able to hear.” And the child looked back and said, “No. In the world to come, God will sign.”4”
― Julia Watts Belser, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole

“But if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that disabled lives have value. We are cherished. We are beloved.”
― Julia Watts Belser, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole

“Disability is spiritual dissent. Disability politics are a provocative challenge to prevailing conceptions of human value, a refusal to swallow the lie that some bodies and minds deserve to be discarded or disdained.”
― Julia Watts Belser, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole

“I claim disability as a vital part of my own identity, as a meaningful way of naming and celebrating the intricate unfolding of my own skin and soul.”
― Julia Watts Belser, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole

“characters are complex and often morally ambiguous. Its stories echo with unresolved emotion, with uncertainty, with uneasy endings. I first read the Bible in a sustained way in a high school English class, under the eye of a brilliant teacher who convinced me that it wasn’t just a book for believers. Fast forward a few decades and you can find me teaching these texts to students not unlike my younger self. I’m”
― Julia Watts Belser, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole