Maysoon Zayid Quotes

Let me make this clear: my impairment is such that without a wheelchair, I can't do very much for myself. I can't get out of bed. I can't get myself to the toilet. I certainly can't get myself to work.

I use an electric wheelchair because I have no sense of balance, and muscle spasticity has arched my spine like a cat's, while my legs are really just for show.

Florida sends me a handicap sticker when I'm there. It's embarrassing. But I can't walk more than six holes before the whole knee swells up, and then I can't go anymore.

I think it was hard at first for my dad to transition to being immobile.

I feel bad for people in wheelchairs and people who have to use crutches.

I'm a full-time wheelchair user. And yet, given the right circumstances, I am able to work.

The gun lobby finds waiting periods inconvenient. You have only to ask my husband how inconvenient he finds his wheelchair from tome to time.

Everything in my house has had to be specially adapted, from the height of the bed to the positioning of doorknobs. Even my Rolls Royce had special stacked pedals and an extra-low steering wheel.

I've gone on in a wheelchair. Another performance I did with no voice - and I had to apologize to the audience and whisper.

I've never been tall. So it's not like I was six-foot, got paralyzed, and now I'm in a wheelchair. It doesn't really faze me all that much.

I did not walk for the first four years of my life.

In comparison to an able-bodied person, it's incredible, the amount of extra resistance I have, in comparison to an able body.

Touch a man who can't walk up right, and that lame man, he's gonna fly.

I was actually in an iron lung for about a year, and then I was paralysed from the neck down for another year after that. So I spent a lotta time just lying down as a kid. And some of my earliest memories from then are of listening to the radio.

By far, the most disabling thing in my life is the physical environment. It dictates what I can and can't do every day.

I still find it strange, I suppose, when I say to someone, 'Can you just pass me my leg?' But I don't ever think about my disability.

You can really do amazing things in a wheelchair. It's very dangerous if you don't know what you're doing, but you can even go up and down stairs in a wheelchair.

I'm afraid they've left their legs at home.

Obviously, because of my disability, I need assistance. But I have always tried to overcome the limitations of my condition and lead as full a life as possible. I have traveled the world, from the Antarctic to zero gravity.

My dad was in a wheelchair and on oxygen for the last few years of his life.

It's factual to say I am a bilateral-below-the-knee amputee. I think it's subjective opinion as to whether or not I am disabled because of that. That's just me.

As a wheelchair user, you can't move about freely. That's the only thing that bothers me a little. When I'm in the Euro Group in Brussels, colleagues who want to talk to me have to come to me. But I hope they know that this has nothing to do with arrogance.

I've had journalists asking me, 'What do we call you - is it handicapped, are you disabled, physically challenged?' I said, 'Well hopefully you could just call me Aimee. But if you have to describe it, I'm a bilateral below-the-knee amputee.'

I can no longer walk in the street. That's over.

We all learn how to use the bodies we're born with, or learn to use them in an adjusted state, whether those bodies are considered disabled or not.