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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On the erasure of disabled people from public life

The blanked out space where we should be is horrifying.

If the only disabled person you've ever seen is actually a non-disabled person pretending to be disabled, your perception of disability is going to be terrible.

You must ask who’s telling the story and what their angle is.

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

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

On the absence of disabled people from the world

I would be yet another blank spot in the world that should have been.

I've always come into rooms with a force, and I've always been the kind of person who doesn't take no for an answer if there's an injustice to be dealt with.

I think that Helen Keller really had to sacrifice a lot of her happiness for the people that she said she loved.

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.

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

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.

We're haunting the world because it's not entirely ours and we scare people, but we also get to be here because it's our world too.

To move past being surprised or awed that I can live my life, and to undo the ableism that led them to believe I couldn't do things in the first place.

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

I was enough before ableism came for me. My dearest wish is that society will learn to accept disabled bodies as whole, instead of viewing disabled bodies as lesser than, instead of creating value judgements based on how a disabled person accesses their world.
Wholeness is not determined by how many eyes you have or how many working ears you have. It doesn't depend on which limbs work or how many of them you have, either. Wholeness is about personhood, and honoring the bodies of your fellow humans.