no one expects all impediments to be miraculously whisked away. In insisting that others view our lives as ample and precious, we are not demanding that they be made perfect. ... If it is both possible and pleasant for me… — Nancy Mairs Copy Share Image
Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can't love what we won't experience. — Nancy Mairs Copy Share Image
If only we could have them back as babies today, now that we have some idea what to do with them. — Nancy Mairs Copy Share Image
In a society that prates about, but seldom practices, communication, the craving to be listened to, heard, understood - which originates with the first… — Nancy Mairs Copy Share Image
My writing arises out of erotic impulse toward an other: it is an act of love. And I want terribly to be loved in… — Nancy Mairs Copy Share Image
I felt permanently exiled from 'normality.' Whether imposed by self or society, this outsider status - and not the disability itself - constitutes the… — Nancy Mairs Copy Share Image
physical disability looms pretty large in one's life. But it doesn't devour one wholly. I'm not, for instance, Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment… — Nancy Mairs Copy Share Image
Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions. — Nancy Mairs Copy Share Image
Do others, I wondered, "see things as I do? I do not think so, for if they did they would not still be alive."… — Nancy Mairs Copy Share Image
That's the trouble with honorable mentions: they let everyone know you applied and didn't win. — Nancy Mairs Copy Share Image
Out of the new arrivals in our lives--the odd word stumbled upon in a difficult text, the handsome black stranger who bursts in one… — Nancy Mairs Copy Share Image
In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience. — Nancy Mairs Copy Share Image
This kind of split makes me crazy, this territorializing of the holy. Here God may dwell. Here God may not dwell. It contradicts everything… — Nancy Mairs Copy Share Image