True Biz Quotes

“Sign language had been so thoroughly stigmatized that in trying to avoid it, parents had unknowingly opted for a modern version of institutionalization, locking their children away in their own minds.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“He took her by the wrists and held her own hands out before her. She looked down at her palms and understood - her being was implied, her potential thoughts and feelings coursing through her body, the names of everything she knew and those she didn't yet, all in the perpetual existence in her fingertips.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“Being motherless was different than being fatherless. It was primal, the archetype for human suffering, like losing the North Star.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“Of course, that was their privilege-to conflate majority with superiority.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“So please, don’t judge me. There is no one more disappointing to me than myself.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“But language bears more than the work of communicating with the mainstream world; it is also the internal vehicle for our thoughts and feelings, the mechanism through which we understand ourselves. Without first having had ASL, I would not have understood myself as a person with a story to tell.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“Kept apart from one another, deaf children frequently receive not only substandard education without full access to language, but a suppressed understanding of the self that can only be righted by representation and a sense of larger community belonging.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“It was hard to imagine what the world might be like if deaf people had as short a fuse about hearing people's inability to sign, their neglect or refusal to caption TV, or , hell the announcements on this bus. Of course, that was their privilege--to conflate majority with superiority.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“Nine out of ten deaf kids had hearing parents, and those parents held Deaf fate in their hands—the fate of their own children, of course, and the future of the Deaf community at large. Problem being, most parents understood deafness only as explained to them by medical professionals: as a treachery of their genes, something to be drilled out.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“imagine telling someone that learning French would ruin their kid’s English, hurt their brain. Usually people scoffed at her and February would nod. It did sound ridiculous. And yet, though fear of bilingualism in two spoken languages had been dismissed as xenophobic nonsense, though it was now desirable for hearing children to speak two languages, medicine held fast to its condemnation of ASL.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“She would learn as much as she could and do whatever she could to dismantle all that she knew to be broken, brick by brick, by hand if she had to. She would keep the bricks, though. She would use them to build something new.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“The fact that he had done this many times before mitigated the length of the homesickness, but not its intensity.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“Her teachers called them “behaviors,” as if any action from a child beyond total compliance was implicitly bad.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“What cruel disease, she thought, to steal from a person all their best moments, and make them relive the worse ones nightly. To force their loved ones to deliver these blows of memory until they, too, were subsumed by the echoing grief.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“That was the problem with hearing people -- you never could tell when they were paying attention.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“Reason is for people who still have something to fear.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“fewer things were more motivating than a fear of one's own extinction.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“Black American Sign Language (BASL) is a dialect of ASL used by Black Americans in the United States, often more heavily in the Southern states. ASL and BASL diverged as a result of race-based school segregation. Because student populations were isolated from one another, the language strands evolved separately, to include linguistic variations in phonology, syntax, and vocabulary. BASL is often stigmatized when compared to “standard” ASL. The measurement of “standard signs” is particularly fraught, because it is based on signs used at Gallaudet University, a formerly segregated institution. The belief that one variant of a language is superior to others is called prescriptivism, and subscribers frequently conflate nonstandard usage with error. In the United States, progressive linguists argue that prescriptivism and prestige languages are tools for preserving existing hierarchies and power structures, with ties to Eurocentrism and white supremacist ideology.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“Q: Why would a man with a deaf wife and mother want to eradicate sign language? A: Eugenics Eugenics (N.): The practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the population’s genetic composition IN HIS WORDS: “Those who believe as I do, that the production of a defective race of human beings would be a great calamity to the world, will examine carefully the causes that lead to the intermarriages of the deaf with the object of applying a remedy.” —Alexander Graham Bell, 1883”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“alexander graham bell, milan 1880, AND WHY YOUR MOM DOESN’T KNOW SIGN LANGUAGE In the late 19th century, manual language versus oral communication for deaf children was a hot topic of debate among educators, embodied by Thomas H. Gallaudet, the cofounder of the American School for the Deaf, and your friendly neighborhood eugenicist, Alexander Graham Bell. Gallaudet, who’d learned sign language from French teacher of the deaf Laurent Clerc, had seen the success of signing Deaf schools firsthand in France, making him a strong proponent of signed languages. But Bell believed deaf people should be taught to speak, and sign language should be removed from Deaf schools.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“DID YOU KNOW? Deaf scholars have proven that Deafness meets the requirements to be considered an ethnicity. Historically this was the common view before oral education nearly eradicated sign languages. Even Alexander Graham Bell, who wanted to rid society of deafness, spoke of “a race of Deaf people.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“She wasn't a stranger to this line of questioning--when her fellow students at Jefferson had deigned to engage with her, it was often in exchanges like this, to inform her that they had once had a deaf dog, or inquire why she didn't want to get cured like those babies they'd seen on YouTube hearing their mothers' voices for the first time.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“There was a theory among linguists that the brain’s capacity for language learning—language as a concept, a modality for thought—is finite. Scientists called the period from ages zero to five the “critical window,” within which a child had to gain fluency in at least one language, any language, or risk permanent cognitive damage. Once the window shut, learning anything became difficult, even impossible—without a language, how does one think, or even feel?”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“It's so damn depressing, February said as she pushed through the side door. That the biggest dream some people can muster up for their child is "look normal.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“Lately she'd been thinking that the truly unfair thing was the expectation that another should completely understand another human just because she'd given birth to them.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“Who would hear the secrets we bear?”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“Charlie was far from the she'd seen. She had language... all those years of energy poured into achieving the aesthetic of being educated rather than actually having learned anything.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“It would be much scarier, even dangerous, to give birth in a place where no one knew sign language. The Deaf community was replete with hospital horror stories, particularly of the labor and delivery variety. Her mother’s friend Lu had been wheeled into the OR without anyone telling her that she was about to have a cesarean; a woman down in Lexington had died from a blood clot after nursing staff ignored the complaints of pain she’d scrawled on a napkin.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“There was a theory among linguists that the brain’s capacity for language learning—language as a concept, a modality for thought—is finite. Scientists called the period from ages zero to five the “critical window,” within which a child had to gain fluency in at least one language, any language, or risk permanent cognitive damage. Once the window shut, learning anything became difficult, even impossible—without a language, how does one think, or even feel? The critical window remained “theoretical,” mostly because intentionally depriving children of language was deemed by ethicists too cruel an experiment to conduct. And yet, February saw the results of such trials every day—children whose parents had feared sign language would mark them, but who ended up marked by its absence. These children had never seen language as it really was, outside the speech therapist’s office, alive and rollicking, had never been privy to the chatter of the playground or around the dinner table.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“Though none of the encounters were pleasant, there had also been moments in which she felt powerful, to have something someone else wanted so intensely.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz