The Country of the Blind Quotes

“Disability can be considered as a biological fact (your eyes don't work) or a social construct (blindness is problematic only insofar as the world is built for the sighted).”
― Andrew Leland, The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight

“The problem arises, as [Adrienne] Asch observed, when "a single trait stands in for the whole, the trait obliterates the whole." Disabled people, like African Americans or any other marginalized group, are dehumanized and oppressed by being reduced to a single, devalued trait; the path to justice must be driven by the rehabilitation of that characteristic.”
― Andrew Leland, The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight

“This is something blind people have said (but really shouldn't have to), over and over, to the sighted world around us: we're still people. We don't see, or see very well, but aside from that, we're just like you. The failure to appreciate this basic fact, that someone's difference does nothing to alter their humanity, is the wellspring of all discrimination, alienation, and oppression. It ought to be obvious, but if you're not disabled, it's stubbornly easy to forget. It's as though, with regard to blind people, the sighted lack any sense of object permanence, the understanding a baby develops when her father hides his face behind his hands: she knows he hasn't really gone any-where. He's still there.”
― Andrew Leland, The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight

“Even the phrase "going blind" is problematic for him now, Will said. "Going blind" has baked into it all the loneliness and isolation that we associate with blindness. A much more accurate way to describe it is "becoming blind." Blindness is much more an arrival than a departure.”
― Andrew Leland, The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight