Elsa Sjunneson Quotes

American Deafblind author, editor and media critic

Add quote

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.

Website

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.

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

Because the reality is being disabled is hard. It's not easy. And so, I don't want you to find that inspiring because it's just how my life is, but I want people to get it so that the world can change.

On raising a Deaf, blind, or Deafblind child

It is always possible to give them every adaptive support and still not have them miss out on the childhood you expected for them if they were non-disabled.

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.

They can sit back and be in awe that a person they did not before perceive as capable, is extremely capable. And then they're done.

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

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

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.

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

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

When you have a disability, casting off the people who are the most supportive of you and who help take care of you is a really dangerous thing to do.

Being a burden is the thing that I struggle with the most.

When people thrust their perception of how you should be onto you, that is horror.

On reworking The Miracle Worker as horror

If you're coming to me with the source material that's saying that somebody's murderously strong, and you want to make that person conform to your reality, someone's gonna die.