Quotes from Lou Ann Walker

Mom turned to me, puzzled. In sign language, she asked, "What was Grandpa saying in the kitchen?" My heart froze.

So much had been lost.

From 1963 through 1965, a nationwide epidemic of rubella—German measles—caused thousands of women to deliver babies who were handicapped in some way:

she threw herself at the black fence, shrieking, wondering why she'd been abandoned.

The only way Tyrone had of communicating was to hit someone.

This was insanity. This was coming out of my mouth and it was madness.

her parents had no way of telling her she was going away to school.

I have talked and listened and heard and there is no me!

I have heard and hidden the insults so long, I have been the conduit so long that I am disappearing!

My greatest fear had always been: The more you get to know me, the less there is to know.

I had to learn I wasn't deaf. I had to start speaking out.

My father, she insisted, was not born deaf. "Insisted" because there was an even greater stigma attached to genetic deafness (and the family) than there was to acquired deafness.

One story was about a deaf man who was driving in the country, when safety bars were lowered across the road at a railroad crossing. The train passed, but the bars weren't raised. Finally, the man went to the stationmaster and wrote him a note: "Please but." That's the punch line. The joke is that the sign for "but" is the index fingers crossed and then opening up, just the way the bars protecting train tracks do.

It was slowly dawning on me that innocence is a protection. They knew very well, better than I, how harsh the world is. And they realized early on they had one of two choices: to be bitter; or to enjoy what they had.

Less and less we were freaks. More and more we were curiosities.

For so long I'd been doing what I'd accused other people of doing—I was seeing the deafness, not the people.

American Sign Language—ASL—is a language unto itself, with its own syntax and grammar. Adjectives follow nouns, as in Romance languages.

The notion that the womb is a silent place is pure fantasy. If a person dives under water, he hears very little because sound is muffled by the cushion of air remaining outside the eardrum. A fetus has no air bubble outside its ear, and water conducts sound better than air.

By the age of two, hearing children perceived their parents' deafness well enough to know automatically that they must use gestures with their parents and other deaf people. If the children talked at all, their voices had an unusual quality and they exaggerated their mouth movements. These same children immediately shifted gears, speaking in "normal" voices, with hearing people.

Having hearing children meant they had to come into contact with hearing people even more frequently than they would have otherwise—hearing teachers and scout leaders wouldn't have been such a part of their lives.

Immediately the stranger would bend over toward me and ask, "Does he lip-read?" as if Dad had suddenly become as inanimate as a cigar store Indian.

Looking for a place to live at a time when landlords wouldn't rent to deaf people and setting up bank accounts when banks often required deaf people to get co-signees just for checking accounts wasn't going to be easy.

For the first time, it hit me that my mother and father were deaf.

Time and again I heard my grandmother Wells say she would give her own hearing to make her daughter "whole." In her mind, deafness was some kind of divine retribution.