blindness Quotes

To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.

“Love is blind.”

“After many years of joyless life, the blind grandmother had at last found something to make her happy; her days were no longer passed in weariness and darkness, one like the other without pleasure or change, for now she had always something to which she could look forward.”

“Please wake me when I’m free I cannot bear captivity 4 I would rather be stricken blind Than 2 live without expression of mind.”

“Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.”

“The flock gets sight of a spot of blood on some chicken and they all go to peckin’ at it, see, till they rip the chicken to shreds, blood and bones and feathers. But usually a couple of the flock gets spotted in the fracas, then it’s their turn. And a few more gets spots and gets pecked to death, and more and more. Oh, a peckin’ party can wipe out the whole flock in a matter of a few hours, buddy, I seen it. A mighty awesome sight. The only way to prevent it—with chickens—is to clip blinders on them. So’s they can’t see.”

Lest it see more, prevent it. Out, vile jelly!

“Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation.”

“For a long time Jonathan forgot about the world that he had come from, that place where the Flock lived with its eyes tightly shut to the joy of flight, using its wings as means to the end of finding and fighting for food. But now and then, just for a moment, he remembered.”

“His one sorrow was not solitude, it was that the other gulls refused to believe the glory of flight that awaited them; they refused to open their eyes and see.”

“Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.”

“Don’t question me! The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them too.”

“Any Christian who blindly accepts the opinions of the majority and in fear and timidity follows a path of expediency and social approval is a mental and spiritual slave.”

“Any Christian who blindly accepts the opinions of the majority and in fear and timidity follows a path of expediency and social approval is a mental and spiritual slave.”

“Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes, That they behold, and see not what they see?”

“No…I should have listened to you. That’s all human beings are! Just blind people.”

“The more unscrupulous I was, the greater my reputation was likely to be, for men are so blind that they even take pride in their blindness.”

“What shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”

“For in the end, [Huxley] was trying to tell us what afflicted the people in ‘Brave New World’ was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”

“I am visible-see this Indian face-yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They’d like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven’t. We haven’t.”

“I seemed forsooth too simple to perceive The serpent stealing on me in the dark.”

“Thus then I answer: since thou hast not spared To twit me with my blindness—thou hast eyes, Yet see’st not in what misery thou art fallen.”

“One who is entirely dependent upon the manual alphabet has always a sense of restraint, of narrowness.”

“Gradually I got used to the silence and darkness that surrounded me and forgot that it had ever been different, until she came—my teacher—who was to set my spirit free.”

“I thought Ryan was dead. Actually, he was still alive, if just barely. The docs worked like hell to save him. Ryan would eventually be medevac’d out of Iraq. His wounds were severe—he’d never see again, not only out of the eye that had been hit but the other as well. It was a miracle that he lived. But at that moment at base, I was sure he was dead. I knew it in my stomach, in my heart, in every part of me. I’d put him in the spot where he got hit. It was my fault he’d been shot.”

“You can’t always see God’s plan.”

“He came in to demand an answer and I told him the truth. That I have fought with myself over that night, one half of me swearing blind that I tied a simple slipknot, the other half convinced that I tied the Langford double. I can never know for sure.”

“They enter into blind darkness who worship Avidya (ignorance and delusion); they fall, as it were, into greater darkness who worship Vidya (knowledge).”

“Fools dwelling in ignorance, yet imagining themselves wise and learned, go round and round in crooked ways, like the blind led by the blind.”

“He asked you quite openly to flatter him, to admire him, his little dodges deceived nobody. What she disliked was his narrowness, his blindness, she said, looking after him.”

“In a world where you can’t open your eyes, isn’t a blindfold all you could ever hope for?”

“The chicken wire has served as armor, protecting the children not from what could see them, but from what they could see.”

″... intelligent following of custom, or even occasionally an intelligent deviation from custom, is better than a blind and simply mechanical adhesion to it.”

″ But to rush at once into despotism because there is a bare possibility of anarchy ensuing from the rejection, or from what is yet more visionary, the small delay that would be occasioned by a revision and correction of the proposed system of government is so superlatively weak, so fatally blind, that it is astonishing any person of common understanding should suffer such an imposition to have the least influence on his judgment.”

“Real love is silent as well as blind.”

“He bent down, clawing blindly and found, finally, their smashed remains. A minor, indirect destruction stemming from the sudden, wholesale smashing of a city. But the only one that greatly interested Henry Bemis. He stared down at the blurred page before him. He began to cry.”

“Poor Henry literally couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. For a while, when he was very young, his parents had thought him an idiot. [...] He was never quite able to catch up. There was never enough time. ”

“Toad blinked in the bright sun. ‘Help!‘, said Toad. ‘I cannot see anything.’ ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Frog. ‘What you see is the clear warm light of April.’ ”

“Then John Dolittle got a fine, big pair of green spectacles; and the plow-horse stopped going blind in one eye and could see as well as ever. And soon it became a common sight to see farm-animals wearing glasses in the country round Puddleby; and a blind horse was a thing unknown.”

“You called and shouted and burst my deafness. You flashed, shone, and scattered my blindness. You breathed odors, and I drew in breath and panted for You. I tasted, and I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and I burned for Your peace.”

“Love blinds. We have both tried to give our sons, not what they needed, but what we needed. We’ve been so busy trying to rewrite our own pasts, we’ve blighted their present.”

“Don’t trade one kind of blindness for another.”

“There was no day or night that passed when I didn’t listen for sounds from the sky. Both my sense of touch and my sense of hearing were beginning to make up for my lack of sight. I separated the sound and each became different.”

“I’ll never forget that first hour of knowing I was blind. I was so frightened that it was hard for me to breathe. It was as if I’d been put inside something that was all dark and I couldn’t get out.”

″‘What have I got in me hand?’ he asked gruffly. The blind man sighed. ‘My life, my boy... my life’s in your hand.‘”

“My blindness. Because I shall never clap eyes on that murderer. Because, till the day I die, I’ll never know what such a monster looks like. D’you understand me, Smith? D’you understand that, to me, devils and angels are all one?”

But, indeed, he was blind and foolish, as he ever and always is.