Try to realize what blindness means to those whose joyous activity is stricken to inaction. It is to live long, long days, and life is made up of days. It is to live immured, baffled, impotent, all God’s world shut out. It is to sit helpless, defrauded, while your spirit strains and tugs at its fetters, and your shoulders ache for the burden they are denied, the rightful burden of labor.

Letter by Helen Keller, read by Mark Twain March 1906, public meeting of the Association for Promoting the Interests of the Blind.