The Short Bus Quotes

“I can’t divorce Kent and his art from what causes pain in Kent’s life. This is true in the lives of many individuals labeled ADHD. Their greatest gifts are interwoven with their greatest weaknesses. This might be true for all of us. But we can make something beautiful from this paradox. Our lives can sometimes be a sort of poem—part genetics, part individual adaptation.”
― Jonathan Mooney, The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal

“Disability is inherently a negation. In our culture, people with disabilities stand more for what they are not than what they are—not normal, not whole—a negation that calls into being its opposite: the normal. The normal looms over all of our lives, an impossible goal that we are told is possible if: if we sit still, if we buy certain consumer goods, if we exercise, if we fix our teeth, if we … The short bus polices that terrain; it patrols a fabricated social boundary demarcating what is healthy and sick, acceptable and broken, enforcing normalcy in all of us. What had I lost in trying to belong to the other side?”
― Jonathan Mooney, The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal

“What I can tell you is what I learned from Jeff, and that is this: If you watch the strange, the other, the bizarre long enough, if you really see these people, you will find familiar pieces of yourself in their experiences. Empathy may be our only hope. I found in Jeff not just something familiar but also a better way to live.”
― Jonathan Mooney, The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal

“Often the topography of who we are is not a story, is not constituted in language, but in the concrete things we do, the places we visit, and the people we know and love.”
― Jonathan Mooney, The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal