Elsa Sjunneson Quotes

American Deafblind author, editor and media critic

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Elsa Sjunneson is an award-winning Deafblind author, editor, historian, media critic, and speaker living in Seattle. Her work includes the forthcoming Dear Blind Lady: Disability Advice You Didn't Know You Needed (Sasquatch Books, October 6, 2026), the Washington State Book Award-winning memoir Being Seen, and Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Sword of the White Horse. She has won three Hugo Awards, an Aurora Award, and a British Fantasy Award for editorial work, and her nonfiction has appeared in venues including CNN, Tor.com, and The Boston Globe.

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The idea that all disabilities look exactly the same harms us every day in real time.

I am Dame Elsa of the order of the bat. I am a knight errant against ableism.

My life is pretty ordinary unless you think I couldn't be this person.

People participate in ableism because they are unthinking, not because they actually benefit from anything.

Would you want to be compared to somebody whose entire monolithic mythology is about how she had to be taught how to conform?

The collective imagination of what is possible in a non-disabled society is narrow, and I live in unimagined space.

Snark lets me be funny while shoving the knife in. It takes a little bit of the edge away. So the people don't always notice that I'm using a scalpel.

I have always known that I was occupying a space that is considered impossible.

I'm only that inspiring if you thought I couldn't cross the street by myself to begin with.

On the erasure of disabled people from public life

The blanked out space where we should be is horrifying.

Why is it the business of the nondisabled to determine what it means to be blind, or the business of the hearing to determine what it means to be deaf? Why are people who don't use wheelchairs policing the visual of a wheelchair user?

So diagnosis capitalism is the idea, but fundamentally capitalism benefits from giving people diagnoses. Because you make money on people having labels.

She couldn’t hear voices. But if she were to lay next to a piano and someone were to use the bass pedal, she describes what it was like to hear that sound. Yeah, so it’s not a lot of hearing. But it’s enough hearing that she was able to know what hearing felt like.
On Helen Keller's residual hearing

With each closed door, with each insult, I fold. I crease. I twist. I bend. I make something out of the rage that wells up inside of my chest. It sits somewhere beneath my collarbone; I can feel it sometimes. I live in a world that doesn't want me.

Productivity is a pernicious lie and the way that it attacks us in terms of being able to rest, in terms of being able to take care of our bodies, is a major component of why disability is so affected by the capitalist model.