All quotes

I am never discouraged by absence of good. I never can be argued into hopelessness.

I, too, can work, and because I love to labor with my head and my hands, I am an optimist in spite of all.

If happiness is to be so measured, I who cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a corner with folded hands and weep.

It is my service to think how I can best fulfil the demands that each day makes upon me, and to rejoice that others can do what I cannot.

It lets us into the soul of things and teaches us that although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.

My share in the work of the world may be limited; but the fact that it is work makes it precious.

Now I know hope and joy.

Now I rejoice in the consciousness that I can think, act and attain heaven.

Once I knew the depth where no hope was, and darkness lay on the face of all things.

I remember an hour when I was discouraged and ready to falter. For days I had been pegging away at a task which refused to get itself accomplished.

As I look back on my struggle to write that little story, it seems to me that I must have had a prophetic vision of the good that would come of the undertaking, or I should surely have failed.

Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process.

Every struggle is a victory.

For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way.

Had it not been for the persistent encouragement of Miss Sullivan, I think I should have given up trying to write altogether.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised

The tedium of that work is hard to conceive.

There, too, after a fit of temper, I went to find comfort and to hide my hot face in the cool leaves and grass.

But I did not dream that that interview would be the door through which I should pass from darkness into light, from isolation to friendship, companionship, knowledge, love.

At the beginning I was only a little mass of possibilities. It was my teacher who unfolded and developed them.

I slip back many times, I fall, I stand still, I run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again and keep it better, I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel encouraged, I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon.

What a joy it is to feel the soft, springy earth under my feet once more, to follow grassy roads that lead to ferny brooks where I can bathe my fingers in a cataract of rippling notes, or to clamber over a stone wall into green fields that tumble and roll and climb in riotous gladness!

Courage returns as we gaze; when we see what has been, we doubt no more that it can be again.

Love at its highest point--love sublime, unique, invincible--leads us straight to the brink of the great abyss, for it speaks to us directly of the infinite and of eternity.

The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.