The people who criticise you will not be the ones taking care of your legs when you are in your wheelchair. People who never drove a car in these conditions, they just don't know.

I can see myself as a very old man in a terrific wheelchair. Only, I won't be photographing the tree outside my window, the way Steichen did. I'll be photographing other old people.

Everyone I tell that I had an aneurysm always says, 'Oh, my cousin died from that.' Well, I didn't, so I'm amazed. I was in a wheelchair, and I had to go to rehab. And now I'm walking!

If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is President, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.

I was bullied from fifth grade on. They started making fun of me because my mom was in a wheelchair, then they started making fun of me because I was poor and then it evolved to my size.

At my wedding, I was dancing so furiously that I fell hard on my kneecaps. The next morning, my knees were so swollen that I had to get a wheelchair at the airport to go on my honeymoon.

I want to go and go, and then drop dead in the middle of something I'm loving to do. And if that doesn't happen, if I wind up sitting in a wheelchair, at least I'll have my high heels on.

All of a sudden, I don't have a leg. I'm in a wheelchair. I have half a foot; I can't even walk to the bathroom. I'm in a bed, I can't move, and I felt like those four walls were my prison.

There was a golden retriever who saved countless lives on September 11 by going back in to find people. His companion was in a wheelchair. He got him out and kept going back in to save others.

You wouldn't want me to play Frost in a wheelchair, would you? 'Frost' is getting a little long in the tooth. I still enjoy doing it, and it's a great part, but I just think he's got to retire.

It was physically difficult, adjusting to wheelchair life, but I remember a great relief and happiness that I was finally getting somewhere, finding musicians to work with that were sympathetic.

As a wheelchair user, I am utterly obsessed with toilets, and all my friends know it. A simple invitation to the pub is consistently followed by, 'Do you know if they have an accessible toilet?'

The battle to find a workplace that's wheelchair accessible is a feat in itself, let alone an employer who's going to be cool about employing someone with a disability in a job you actually want to do.

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.

Being in a wheelchair for 30 years. I'm not whining about it because I don't dwell on things I can't do anything about, you know. I never really think about until somebody mentions it. I did take a bullet.

There are people I would like to work with. It's a bit harder, because I live out in the sticks anyway, and plus being in a wheelchair means that I can't really circulate. So I tend to stick to my own thing.

We always joke that our road crew will have to wheelchair us up onstage soon because this is what we do. This is what we love to do. This is what God put us on earth to do until the day we take our last breath.

They see me wheeling around in a beautiful gown, and they realize you can look elegant, and you can lead a happy life in a wheelchair. I know I've helped handicapped people, because I've received many comments.

I played a paraplegic on a show called 'Neighbours.' Just turned up on set, sat in a wheelchair. The producer came up to me one day and said, 'We have to cut around that entire scene because your leg was moving.'

I was told it couldn't be done. My dream was impossible. But on March 3, 2016, after spending 10 years in a wheelchair paralyzed from the waist down, I took my first steps without assistance. That was no easy task.

Today, I am a touring standup comic who cannot stand up. Within three minutes, I begin to wilt, lose my balance, and topple over. I can tap dance and run in heels, but I need to use a wheelchair to navigate airports.

Being competitive is in my nature. I actually think being competitive saved my life. It's given me the constant drive to be better, and when I was in that hospital bed and that wheelchair, it made me want to get better.

My mother, Laura Sumner, had cerebral palsy. She was born absolutely fine, but after about three days, she started having convulsions that left her with a condition that would confine her to a wheelchair her entire life.

No one wants to live in a wheelchair unable to talk, only winking once for yes and twice for no. It's perfectly reasonable that there will come a point where the balance of judgment of life over death swings the other way.

I've found that it's actually more of a disability to be tall than short. I have no problem fitting into plane toilets etc, and the adaptations made for wheelchair users - such as the lowering of bank machines - work for me as well.

Every year, I have a tournament in Czech Republic, so there are a lot of things I'm trying to do. Sometimes the money goes towards children; sometimes it's for wheelchair tennis players. I try to change it so everybody gets something.

Even if your parents don't have Alzheimer's or aren't in a wheelchair, your parents get old - if you're lucky to have parents who live for a long time. It's a challenge, and it's difficult and lovely and touching and awful and ghastly and real.

The image of Stephen Hawking - who has died aged 76 - in his motorised wheelchair, with head contorted slightly to one side and hands crossed over to work the controls, caught the public imagination as a true symbol of the triumph of mind over matter.

I was stuck in a wheelchair playing this deranged villain. I felt this mass amount of rage at being so confined. I thought, 'What can I do that is the direct opposite of this situation?' The only thing I could think of was that I could sing and dance.

On the first day I got my wheelchair, I was also given all my clothes for the next day, a little pile on the chair. I was so proud of myself for getting it all on - the socks and everything. Dressing is a struggle, and it can take up to an hour and a half.

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.

We're normal people. Don't be scared because we are in a chair. People don't understand that. They think, 'Oh, a wheelchair, something's wrong with their heads, something's just not right.' Well yeah, we may be a little twisted, but no more than anyone else.

I've seen my mom confined to a wheelchair in the last three years of her life. Both her knees had given way, and there was no way she could undergo surgery at her age. Even though I was concerned for her, I didn't know at that time what she had to go through.

Throughout human history, some of our most influential inventors, entrepreneurs, and leaders have had disabilities. For example, Bill Gates, Sir Richard Branson, and Charles Schwab are all dyslexic, while scientist Stephen Hawking has used a wheelchair for decades.

I was on the wheelchair for six months and lost all hope of returning to the field. I thought my career was over, but my brother kept on encouraging me. 'All that you need to do is to be resolute to return to the field,' he said. These words turned out to be magical.

Good design should be available to everyone - and I do mean everyone. What I spent on the wheelchair I'm in could buy a small Mercedes. It's not only unfair to me; it's unfair to someone who's indigent but has the same needs. My goal is to make all objects affordable.

I don't want to lose my legs, you know. I don't want to be wheeled around in a wheelchair. I don't want to be attached to a catheter. I saw all that stuff happen to my father, and as much as it upset me because I loved my father so much, it also really traumatized me.

Even now, a year later, people ask me about the Wheelchair Photo: what do I think about it? Does it bother me? The honest answer: I don't think about it. I glanced at the photo once, about a week after the bombing. I knew immediately I never wanted to look at it again.

The cost is minimal, but one of the things that you want in a universal design is to make the plan as open as you can... and to still have walls around bedrooms and that sort of thing, and to keep the corridors wide enough so the wheelchair can do a 360 in the corridor.

There are many role models I've been around, and kind of the biggest one - there's a show called 'Push Girls,' with all women in wheelchairs, and they're all really good friends of mine. And one, Angela Rockwood, is still modeling, in a wheelchair. After a car accident.

The doctors misdiagnosed me at first - they told me I had a pinched nerve. But my situation was getting worse. The tumor was cutting off the circulation in my nerves. And in two weeks' time, I was left paralyzed. I went from a cane to crutches to a walker to a wheelchair.

Sometimes I think I don't want to grow old as an actress and deal with the fact that I'm getting less jobs 'cause my face is changing, and then the men... But at the same time, I'm pretty competitive. I don't know if I'd bow out. I might still be acting when I'm in a wheelchair.

I am in touch with a company that hopes to replicate my voice. However, they are not replicating my original voice - if they did that, I would sound like a man in his 20s, which would be very strange! They are actually trying to replicate the synthesizer that sits on my wheelchair.

When FDR died in 1945, he was still paralyzed from the waist down. After he died, his portrait was put on the dime. Through his illness, he went out of his way to minimize his difficulties. Of the thousands of pictures taken of him, only two show him in a leg brace or a wheelchair.

I thought being in the wheelchair might be kind of limiting for me as an actor. It turned out cool in a lot of ways. Of course, at the end of the day, I can get up out of the chair and go home, but I'm very acutely aware that most people can't, so I try to give the situation that depth.

When I was a child, doctors sent my grandmother home in a wheelchair to die. Diagnosed with end-stage heart disease, she already had so much scar tissue from bypass operations that the surgeons had essentially run out of plumbing. There was nothing more to do, they said; her life was over at 65.

I quickly learned that asking if an interview space was wheelchair accessible was a bad idea; it gave a potential employer an immediate bad impression. It was either a black mark against my name, or a straight up discussion of why I wouldn't be able to work there because they had no wheelchair access.

When I ask people what they think of when they hear the term 'cerebral palsy,' I usually get one of two responses. They either think of a smiling, crumpled child in a wheelchair on a poster or commercials on late night TV with lawyers enticing parents of CP kids to sue the pants off their obstetrician.

My father had several strokes and heart attacks. I was with him when he died, and it was a horrible death. He had been a very articulate man, and to lose that, never to be able to speak properly and to be unable to move - he had always been a very vigorous man, so to be in a wheelchair and mumbling - was terrible.

My father and mother are both very smart people and I always felt I was a little short of the mark. So I would compensate with a character like Logan Cale. He's wearing glasses, he's in a wheelchair, he's a computer genius. He's very far away from who I am, but I really wanted to play roles where I'd be taken seriously.

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