Riding the Bus with My Sister Quotes

“Happiness, I have grasped, is a destination, like strawberry Fields. Once you find the way in, there you are, and you'll never feel low again.”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“Maybe we are all Beths, boarding other people's life journeys, or letting them hop aboard ours. For a while we ride together. A few minutes, a few miles. Companions on the road, sharing our air and our view, our feet swaying to the same beat. Then you get off at your stop, or I get off at mine. Unless we decide to stay on longer together.
p 251”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“... she's sad a lot. She's sad in the way Laura wears glasses and Max has freckles and Beth is retarded. There's no reason, it's just the way it is.”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“Then," he says, "as my mind got functioning, everything was just beautiful. There was no right or wrong feeling, no social pressure. I believe that's what heaven's going to be like..."
p 55”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“But those were only the headlines. The more important stories lay deep inside...

p 292”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“So you never know when you can get through.

p 179 Jack the Bus Driver talking about helping a woman on the bus who was an alcoholic”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“Just because I am not a saint does not mean that I am a demon”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“Looking back in time was very exciting to me. But looking forward is more challenging—nothing unfolds as you anticipate, and it’s the small things, not the huge geologic shifts, that make or break you.”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“I realize, as the tightness yields in my shoulders and hips and feet, that Beth might well have wanted me to meet her drivers because I needed them, too."
p 167”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“It’s a kind of innocence, seeing the good in humanity, and wishing for even more. That’s too rare in this world.” “But it can get us hurt when the bad stuff happens.” “Well, maybe that’s okay,” he says. “Maybe it’s the price you pay to be more human.”
― Rachel Simon, Riding The Bus with My Sister

“But when I went back to work, things inside me started to slide back to the way they used to be. I didn’t want that, not after I’d tasted the pureness of existence. It made me wonder what we’re here for. So I started reading the Bible. I took a notebook on the bus every day, and wrote down everything I thought about—love, suffering, death—and the Scriptures made sense for the first time in my life. “The first part was all about getting close to God. The next step was understanding Jesus. “I said, ‘Okay, now I’m being good, I’m close to God.’ Wrong. Because once you look at Jesus, it tears you apart piece by piece. All your pride, your anger, your selfishness. That’s where I’m at now, working on every part of myself.”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“In the Big Apple, you get people like Beth on every bus, and nobody would say a word. You get races mixing, and it’s no big deal. Old people, young people, everyone keeps their mouth shut. There’s just more tolerance there.”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“I observe that I too must alter my vocabulary. No longer is it proper to say, as I have all my life, that someone “is mentally retarded.” As I discover on other websites, by using the new “People First Language,” one focuses on the person first, the disability last, as in “a woman who has mental retardation,” or “a man with mental retardation.” The analogy is that people with cancer have cancer, they are not cancer itself; the disability is only one aspect of who they are. In addition, with People First Language, one can avoid using the word “retarded,” which is too close to the familiar slur. In fact, some websites minimize the use of “mental retardation” by using as synonyms terms such as “developmental disability,” “intellectual disability,” and “cognitive disability.” As I scribble down this People First Language, I realize that many of my acquaintances might disparage such linguistic changes as mere nods to political correctness, and for a moment I do, too. But then I think, Look at how many cultural barriers Beth has had to deal with throughout her life—and how many physical barriers people with other disabilities experience: sidewalks without curb cuts, restrooms lacking accessible facilities, cabs that refuse guide dogs. Altering the way I speak is nothing compared to what she, and they, go through almost all day, almost every day. And it is such a simple way to help transform the cultural landscape that it seems arrogant and misguided to resist doing so.”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“I lost myself, but in the end that helped me find myself. You’ve just got to have faith and work at it.” “With anything?” I ask. “Anything,” she says, as a gap finally opens in the intersection. “As long as you accept the hardest thing of all: that you might have to lose to win.”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“[S]he spontaneously threw back her head and trumpeted,I'm diffrent! I'm diiffrent!" as if she were hurling a challenge with all her might beyond the limits of the sky.”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“I'm diffrent! I'm diffrent!" as if she were hurling a challenge with all her might beyond the limits of the sky.”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“Maybe this is how it goes, I think, watching Beth and Melanie, remembering the people I have loved, and the ones I wish I hadn't lost. Maybe we are all Beths, boarding other people's life journeys, or letting them hop aboard ours. For a while we ride together. A few minutes, a few miles. Companions on the road, sharing our air and our view, our feet swaying to the same beat. Then you get off at your stop, or I get off at mine. Unless we decide to stay on longer together.”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“not thinking of what I can get, but thinking of what I can give”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“Love is when you care for somebody, and you be willing to go out of your way and do anything for that person, and to take care of that person, and if they have problems, that you can help them out any way you know how. If they sick, that you can bring ’em medicine, or give ’em a helping hand. That’s what love is.”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“say these like it’s nothing. Teachers will say, “Obviously in the childlike actions taken by the innocent half-wit Lennie, you can see Steinbeck’s extraordinary literary blah blah blah,” and you’re supposed to go along. I go along because what else can you do? But I can’t go along when kids bungle a book report and smack their heads and say, “I’m such a retard.” Or when someone messes up on the parallel bars in gym, and on the mats below someone else calls out, “What a retard.” You’re supposed to agree that, yes, that would be as bad as getting thrown out of the human race. You’re supposed to laugh. I never laugh. I just stare sharply and say, “My sister’s retarded.”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“At the landing, Mommy turns to us and says, “Let’s let the puppy go pish,” so she opens the door and he scoots into the snow outside.”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“She’s sad in the way Laura wears glasses and Max has freckles and Beth is retarded. There’s no reason, it’s just the way it is.”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“Ah, look at that sunrise!” Tim says at the first stoplight, lifting his arms toward the windshield. “Four billion sunrises, over the dinosaurs, the pharaohs, and now ours today. And no one’s ever the same. Isn’t it just the most remarkable thing? Each day is fresh and unique, yet each is also a link to every dawn all the way back to the Precambrian.”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

“once a willful child who, like many willful children, felt most secure at home, has grown into an extravagantly social and nonconforming adult, one who creates camaraderie out of bus timetables, refuses to trouble herself when people look askance at her—and, in a buoyant refutation of the notion that mental retardation equals sluggishness, zips about jauntily to her own inner beat. My sister (my sister! I boast to myself) maneuvers through the world with the confidence of a museum curator walking approvingly through her galleries, and, far from bemoaning her otherness, she exults in it.”
― Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey