Rosemary Mahoney
Rosemary Mahoney
Rosemary Mahoneyis an American non-fiction writer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth28 January 1961
CountryUnited States of America
I'm very curious about the world, foreign cultures.
amount certain guess might oddly time tough wasted worrying writer
I'm not confident, and yet I'm oddly confident. You have to have a certain amount of ego to be a writer in the first place, and to write things that might be controversial. I've wasted a lot of time worrying about it: am I tough enough to do it? Well, I guess, or I wouldn't have done it. The day it's too difficult for me, I guess I'll stop.
atlantic avid england grew including various
I grew up in New England at the edge of the Atlantic and have for many years been an avid rower. I've rowed in various places, including the Ganges in India, the River Shannon in Ireland, and the Sea of Galilee.
believed continue educated home modern picked though until
Though my grandmother had picked up modern ideas in America, she still had some conflicting 19th-century Irish notions. She believed that daughters, educated though they may be, should continue to live at home until they were married.
constantly trying
As a teen-ager I was constantly trying to please people, which I guess is true of all adolescents.
camera feels future gets incredibly painting private security sketch stored valuable
I am like a security camera ever on the watch. The furtive quality of vision feels to me like an incredibly valuable weapon. Everything I see gets transformed into a private sketch or painting in my mind, stored away for future reference, future evidence, future ammunition.
expected image people quaint ways
China was not at all what I expected it to be. I had an image of China as a very quaint and mysterious and peaceful place. Well, it's quaint and mysterious in some respects, but not in the ways I had thought. The people are mysterious. They don't often tell you what they feel.
bought certain desk floss halfway morning opposite pictures postage rare roll second stamps stopping teeth time turning
It's rare that I'm able to get to my desk in the morning without stopping halfway there, turning around, and going in the opposite direction because of a pressing need to straighten all the pictures on the walls, floss my teeth a second time, and make certain that there really are 100 postage stamps in the roll of stamps I bought yesterday.
lifts revealed
There's as much revealed in the way a person lifts a glass as in what they say about some political issue.
blind blindness cultures curse god people perceived remarkable second terrible
To me, the remarkable thing is it's pretty much unanimous the way blind people have been perceived in all cultures and for millennia. The first is, if they can't see, they must be stupid. The second one is, and this is a very old one, that blindness is such a terrible thing that it must be a curse from God for some evil that you committed.
born couple effective gather human infant learn process similar takes transmit
We are not born with effective vision. The human infant has to learn how to see. The eyes gather information, they transmit it to the brain, but the brain doesn't know how to process it yet. We learn how to see in a way that's very similar to the way we learn how to speak. It takes a couple of years.
almost attention detail extreme fact good happens neither nor notice seemingly strikes ten tip visual
If one person in a group of ten is missing the tip of his little finger, I will notice it almost immediately. This extreme attention to visual detail is not a virtue, just a fact of my person. It happens seemingly involuntarily and strikes me as neither good nor bad.
anyone brother call god morning school sent shoes
My mother was not what anyone would call sweet, and she wasn't conventional. When my brother couldn't find his shoes one morning, she said, 'Oh, for God's sake, it won't kill him not to have shoes for a day,' and sent him to school without them.
believed faith trying
My mother had faith in me, had more faith in me than I had in myself, and knowing that she did made me try to find faith. She believed in trying things.