Top 35 Alice Wong Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A brain injury is a particularly hard injury to have because it changes who you are in ways that other injuries don’t, since it affects how you think, act, and respond. It’s hard to talk about that loss and grief with people who have never experienced it.”

— Alice Wong

2. “Advocacy is not just a task for charismatic individuals or high-profile community organizers. Advocacy is for all of us; advocacy is a way of life. It is a natural response to the injustices and inequality in the world.”

— Alice Wong

3. “These stories do not seek to explain the meaning of disability or to inspire or elicit empathy. Rather, they show disabled people simply being in our own words, by our own accounts. Disability Visibility is also one part of a larger arc in my own story as a human being.”

— Alice Wong

4. “Storytelling can be more than a blog post, essay, or book. It can be an emoji, a meme, a selfie, or a tweet. It can become a movement for social change.”

— Alice Wong

5. “Disabled people caring for each other can be a place of deep healing,” says Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice.”

— Alice Wong

6. “Disabled people have always existed, whether the word disability is used or not. To me, disability is not a monolith, nor is it a clear-cut binary of disabled and nondisabled. Disability is mutable and ever-evolving. Disability is both apparent and nonapparent. Disability is pain, struggle, brilliance, abundance, and joy. Disability is sociopolitical, cultural, and biological. Being visible and claiming a disabled identity brings risks as much as it brings pride.”

— Alice Wong

7. “When something can’t be fixed then the question is what can we build instead?”

— Alice Wong

8. “Stuttering is only a problem – in fact is only abnomral – because our culture places so much value on efficiency and self-mastery. Stuttering breaks communication only because ableist notions have already decided how fast and smooth a person must speak to be heard and be taken seriously. An arbitrary line has been drawn around “normal” speech.”

— Alice Wong

9. “Art is supposed to make you feel something, and I began to realize my appearance was my art. My body, my face, my scars told a story – my story. But I guess that’s how life works sometimes – noticing beauty only in retrospect and poetry, in silence.”

— Alice Wong

10. “I feel a little bitter that most non-disabled people do not have this dilemma of whether they will exchange their privacy to be seen as human. I am also aware that I am not alone in this experience, and that many marginalized people are put in the position of having to prove their humanity every day.”

— Alice Wong

11. “This may feel true for every era, but I believe I am living in a time where disabled people are more visible than ever before. And yet while representation is exciting and important, it is not enough. I want and expect more. We all should expect more. We all deserve more.”

— Alice Wong

12. “We should not make disabled lives subject to debate.”

— Alice Wong

13. “For a government that claims to seek to reduce and prevent violence, transformative and holistic measures like community conversations and community accountability should be at least a part of the solution.”

— Alice Wong

14. “After a decade of all-volunteer advocacy, I have come to view every incarceration as a missed opportunity to love and transform; as a loss of time, life, and dreams of our community; and as state violence. Some of our greatest assets and resources in this struggle are exiled from our communities and languishing in this nation’s labyrinth of violent institutions.”

— Alice Wong

15. “I took a deep breath and – alongside the oxygen and the carbon dioxide – I exhaled tidbits of the intense shame and fear that I had carried as an extra weight on my backbone.”

— Alice Wong

16. “I don’t understand it,” I continued. “These things, they just keep happening, and I know it has to mean something. It has to. I want my suffering to mean something. I want this pain to matter.”

— Alice Wong

17. “You enter some activist space, Tumblr, a campus group, your neighborhood cultural center. You’re expected to make mistakes, but to eventually never mess up anyone’s pronoun, ever, to never accidentally use the wrong vocabulary, regardless of how educated you are, self-educated or formally.”

— Alice Wong

18. “Jessie Lorenz talked with her friend Herb Levine about his involvement in the 1977 504 sit-ins – the longest nonviolent occupation of a federal building. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was a federal law that outlawed discrimination based on disability in any program or activity receiving federal funding.”

— Alice Wong

19. “One of the biggest things that’s so toxic about ableism and capitalism is this idea that our worth is based on our productivity. We are interdependent. We know there’s more to our worth than just whether we’re taxpayers or whether we can work fort or more hours a week.”

— Alice Wong

20. “IHS is also grossly underfunded: in 2016, Congress allotted $4.8 billion for IHS, which came out to approximately $1,297 per person.”

— Alice Wong

21. “Internalized ableism is so hard to overcome partially because those beliefs are so often reinforced in society. It’s not just in our heads. It’s in our daily lives and experiences... and then it gets in our heads.”

— Alice Wong

22. “For crip time is broken time. It requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world.”

— Alice Wong

23. “The many identities you hold and your lived experiences are not in conflict with each other; they make you sharp, whole, and extraordinary.”

— Alice Wong

24. “So many disabled people live short lives, largely because of social determinants of health like lack of healthcare, inadequate housing, or unmet basic needs such as clean air and water.”

— Alice Wong

25. “There is a persistent belief amongst abled people that a cure is what disabled people should want. To abandon our disabled selves and bodies and assimilate into a perhaps unachievable abled skin.”

— Alice Wong

26. “This year when I run my tongue around my mouth, know I am sharpening those new bones into teeth.”

— Alice Wong

27. “A lot of folks equate the manic energy of being bipolar with the creative spark that drives artists to brilliance. They point to so many great artists in history who lived with mental illness and say, “There it is, that energy, that’s what made them great!” Except for so many artists, mental illness didn’t make them great. It made them ill. And if they weren’t careful, it made them gone.”

— Alice Wong

28. “Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get.”

— Alice Wong

29. “Sometimes a peach is just a peach. Sometimes a peach is a cosmic portal to relationships that sustain and tie us to one another.”

— Alice Wong

30. “The peculiar drama of my life has placed me in a world that by and large thinks it would be better if people like me did not exist. My fight has been for accommodation, the world to me and me to the world.”

— Alice Wong

31. “God didn’t put me on this street to provide disability awareness training to the likes of them. In fact, no god put anyone anywhere for any reason, if you want to know.”

— Alice Wong

32. “In high school, I confided in a nurse that I was trying to be sexually active, but bladder and bowel incontinence were affecting my ability to be intimate with my then-partner. Their only solution was to suggest that there would be people who would be “into that.” My dating pool was instantly reduced to people who would fetishize me.”

— Alice Wong

33. “We are a symphony with one instrument playing all the parts. To make the symphony as dynamic as can be instruments must be given to other players.”

— Alice Wong

34. “All responses to the world take place within our bodies. – Gloria Anzaldua.”

— Alice Wong

35. “What has him so convinced it would be best to allow parents to kill babies with severe disabilities, and not other kinds of babies, if no infant is a “person” with a right to life? I learn it is partly that both biological and adoptive parents prefer healthy babies. But I have trouble with basing life-and-death decisions on market considerations when the market is structured by prejudice.”

— Alice Wong

36. “I’m told by the technicians to maintain an average amount of walking on a daily basis. Don’t go overboard, but don’t be lazy, either. Stay in the middle. The insurance company could pull my data and decide whether I have used my leg enough to justify the next one.”

— Alice Wong

37. “Privilege is being able to keep a prescribed timetable without fear of paying the rent, being in pain or becoming sick, losing health care, and taking care of your family and yourself.”

— Alice Wong