A Quote by Sharon M. Draper

She talked to me like I was just like any other student, not a kid in a wheelchair. — © Sharon M. Draper
She talked to me like I was just like any other student, not a kid in a wheelchair.
I've always felt like a kid, and I still feel like a kid, and I've never had any problem tapping into my childhood, and my kid side. And I think that's a very universal thing, I don't think it's unique to me at all. People I've talked to in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s have all told me "You know, I still feel 20." So I don't expect that I'm going to be any different.
She didn't like to be talked about. Equally, she didn't like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the grace, even at eleven, to know there was no pleasing her. She thought a lot, analytically, about other people's feelings, and had only just begun to realize that this was not usual, and not reciprocated.
It's like people you see sometimes, and you can't imagine what it would be like to be that person, whether it's somebody in a wheelchair or somebody who can't talk. Only, I know that I'm that person to other people, maybe to every single person in that whole auditorium. To me, though, I'm just me. An ordinary kid.
Any kind of dictatorship, I'm uneasy. I just don't like dictators. I don't like crowds. I don't like hordes, and I don't like other people telling me what to do. This is probably a reaction against people telling me what to do when I was a kid. I won't join any group, espouse a cause against some other people.
When I was a kid I loved to read, but I didn't write and I didn't create imaginary worlds. So, if one student walks away thinking, "She's obviously just an ordinary person, yet she gets to make her living doing what she wants to do. Maybe that applies to me, too," then I feel like my time has been well spent.
What crystallized the importance of speaking out like that - of making nonviolence not just a tool or a tactic, but a way of life - was in San Diego [at Comic-Con]. One of the young girls who marched with us was wearing a hijab, and she came up to me afterward because I talked about my beard, and I talked about why I was doing it, and she came up and she gave me a hug, and she was crying. And she said, "Thank you. You have no idea how the other students treat me because they're shown that this is OK by Donald Trump. Thank you for speaking out."
My sister just had a baby, a little newborn. The kid is adorable, so cute. She wouldn't let me hold him, she refuses. She says, 'No way, Anthony, I'm afraid you're gonna drop him.' I'm 32 years old. Like I'm some kind of idiot. Like I don't have a million other ways to hurt that baby.
He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patters, like jargon, making pretty sounds in the air.
I went to elementary like any other kid, but I was just always a little different. I had that sparkle, and everyone told my mom, 'She needs to be on TV, acting.'
I did a show in Germany, and some kid - he was disabled - he was actually in a wheelchair, and he came out to my show, and he couldn't get across to me what he was trying to say, and you could see that he was frustrated because he couldn't fully express himself, and I just felt like, 'Wow, he's just really passionate about me.'
When I was about 17, I didn't speak. English was like a foreign language. I'd just grunt. The only time I talked was when I said my lines on set. I didn't speak to any of the actors or anything. Then one day Alison from the Corrie press office started talking to me in the green room and I just decided to talk back. She ran upstairs to tell everyone that she'd just had a 10-minute conversation with me like it was the most unbelievable thing in the world. I just woke up one day and thought, 'I'm going to talk today'. I've really made up for lost time since.
With hardly any effort at all, she made me feel special. Just like all the other people she toyed with.
I actually quite love following Lisa Rinna on Twitter, because she tweets like I tweet, which is like, 'Just dropped off the kids!' Or, 'Hey, here's a great sale at the grocery store!' It's such real life, and to me she's like a celebrity - she looks like Hollywood to me - that following her makes me feel like, stars are just like us!
Ma is my biggest critic. When she cleans my cupboard she keeps nagging me as to why I have 20 shoes or why my accessories don't match my dresses. I just keep hiding things from her. There are times when I wonder why she can't praise me like other mommies. But, in a way she is right and I like it when she corrects me.
I grew up as normally as any other kid. Between that small TV part I did at five and when I turned professional actor at 18, I stayed away from the limelight, so I was just like any typical kid who went to school.
You probably think Stephen Hawking is in that wheelchair because of a motor neuron disease. But if you got as much barely-legal student poontang as The Hawkster, you'd be in a wheelchair too.
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