| I am filled with the wonder of her knowledge,
acquired because shut out from all distractions. If I could have been deaf,
dumb, and blind I also might have arrived at something. - Mark Twain's Speeches Blindness is an exciting business, I tell you; if you don't believe it get up some dark night on the wrong side of your bed when the house is on fire and try to find the door. - quoted by Helen Keller, Midstream |
Mark Twain with Helen Keller |
Helen Keller has been dumb, stone deaf, and stone blind, ever since she was
a little baby a year-and-a-half old; and now at sixteen years of age this miraculous
creature, this wonder of all the ages, passes the Harvard University examination
in Latin, German, French history, belles lettres, and such things, and
does it brilliantly, too, not in a commonplace fashion. She doesn't know merely
things, she is splendidly familiar with the meanings of them.
When she writes an essay on a Shakespearean character, her English is fine and
strong, her grasp of the subject is the grasp of one who knows, and her page
is electric with light. Has Miss Sullivan taught her by the methods of India
and the American public school? No, oh, no; for then she would be deafter and
dumber and blinder than she was before. It is a pity that we can't educate all
the children in the asylums.
- Following the Equator
Ad from the New
York Sun, April 10, 1903, p. 9.
The two most interesting characters of the nineteenth century
are Helen Keller and Napoleon Bonaparte.
- New York Sun, April 10, 1903
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