No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp.

Disability doesn't make you exceptional, but questioning what you think you know about it does.

My disability exists not because I use a wheelchair, but because the broader environment isn't accessible.

I dance as a political statement, because disabled bodies are inherently political, but I mostly dance for all the same reasons anyone else does: because it heals my spirit and fills me with joy.

I've been an atheist ever since I heard there was only a stairway to heaven

We are a society that treats people with disabilities with condescension and pity, not dignity and respect.

I am not a snowflake. I am not a sweet, infantilising symbol of fragility and life. I am a strong, fierce, flawed adult woman. I plan to remain that way, in life and in death.

Too often, we fall into the trap of thinking 'equal' means 'the same' and that we achieve equality by treating everyone identically.

Disability is often framed, in medical terms, as the ultimate disaster and certainly as a deficit.

I once choked on a chip at a friend's birthday when I was seven and had to be sent home, as I'd broken my collarbone coughing.

We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.

Gratitude makes you a better, stronger, wiser person. Ingratitude makes you a negative, angry, miserable person. Which person do you choose to be?

A lot of people have a particular song that, no matter their mood, turns them on. With me, it's Eleanor Rigby.

Nature goes her own way, and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order.

We live under a prince who is an enemy to fraud, a prince whose eyes penetrate into the heart, and whom all the art of impostors can't deceive.

I am alive and well and unconcerned about the rumors of my death. But if I were dead, I would be the last to know.

All the sciences are, in some measure, linked with each other, and before the one is ended, the other begins.

It is a sin to judge any man by his post

Love is nothing but the fear of mortal man at the thought of solitude.