“A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it.”

"To the Indianapolis Clergy." The Iconoclast (Indianapolis, IN) (1883)
Context: There is also this remarkable fact: Paul quotes none of the miracles of the New Testament. He says not one word about the multitude being fed miraculously, not one word about the resurrection of Lazarus, nor of the widow’s son. He had never heard of the lame, the halt, and the blind that had been cured; or if he had, he did not think these incidents of enough importance to be embalmed in an epistle.

"Christmas in the Dark" in Ladies Home Journal (December 1906)
Context: The only real blind person at Christmas-time is he who has not Christmas in his heart. We sightless children had the best of eyes that day in our hearts and in our finger-tips. We were glad from the child's necessity of being happy. The blind who have outgrown the child's perpetual joy can be children again on Christmas Day and celebrate in the midst of them who pipe and dance and sing a new song!

"No Kaddish for Weinstein".
Without Feathers (1975)

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Silence

Source: The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Ch. XI

Source: Light (2002), Chapter 29 “Surgery” (p. 361)

Source: The Awakening