Christopher Reeves Quotes

So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.

Once you choose hope, anything's possible.

A Hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.

If I can laugh, I can live.

I'm not living the life I thought I would lead, but it does have meaning, purpose. There is love... there is joy... there is laughter.

At first, dreams seem impossible, then improbable, and eventually inevitable.

Chris[topher] Reeve wisely parsed the difference between optimism and hope. Unlike optimism, he said, 'Hope is the product of knowledge and the projection of where the knowledge can take us.

Even though I don't personally believe in the Lord, I try to behave as though He was watching.

Either you choose to stay in the shallow end of the pool or you go out into the ocean.

A hero is an ordinary person doing things in an extra ordinary way.

We all have many more abilities and internal resources than we know. My advice is that you don't need to break your neck to find out about them.

there is a relationship between the mind and the body that can both create a physical condition and enable us to recover from it

Once you choose hope, anything’s possible.

A hero is someone who, in spite of weakness, doubt or not always knowing the answers, goes ahead and overcomes anyway.

There was something else that [Christopher] Reeve told me privately, off camera, and it made me grin. While he was lying in the hospital, just becoming conscious with tubes connected to all parts of his body, a doctor in a white coat came in and with a Russian accent, commanded: "Turn over!" Are you nuts? Reeve thought. I said: 'Turn over!'" the doctor repeated. As Reeve was about to answer "the imbecile", he realized there was something familiar about the man in the white coat. He wasn't a doctor at all. He was Reeve's old buddy from acting school at Julliard, Robin Williams. Reeve waited for a breath, and almost choked with laughter. He realized, he told me, "If I can laugh, I can live.

Creation is built upon the promise of hope, that things will get better, that tomorrow will be better than the day before. But it's not true. Cities collapse. Populations expand. Environments decay. People get ruder. You can't go to a movie without getting in a fight with the guy in the third row who won't shut up. Filthy streets. Drive-by shootings. Irradiated corn. Permissible amounts of rat-droppings per hot dog. Bomb blasts, and body counts. Terror in the streets, on camera, in your living room. Aids and Ebola and Hepatitis B and you can't touch anyone because you're afraid you'll catch something besides love and nothing tastes as good anymore and Christopher Reeve is [dead] and love is statistically false. Pocket nukes and subway anthrax. You grow up frustrated, you live confused, you age frightened, you die alone. Safe terrain moves from your city to your block to your yard to your home to your living room to the bedroom and all you want is to be allowed to live without somebody breaking in to steal your tv and shove an ice-pick in your ear. That sound like a better world to you? That sound to you like a promise kept?

If I can laugh, I can live.

He was like an untied balloon that had been inflated and immediately released. I

Who's judging American Idol? Paula Abdul? Paula Abdul judging a singing contest is like Christopher Reeve judging a dance contest!

I have to stop this cascade of memories, or at least take them out of their drawer only for a moment, have a brief look, and put them back. I know how to do it now: I have to take the key to acting and apply it to my life. There is no other way to survive except to be in the moment. Just as my accident and its aftermath caused me to redefine what a hero, I've had to take a hard look at what it means to live as fully as possible in the present. How do you survive in the moment when it's bleak and painful and the past seems so seductive?

What makes Superman a hero is not that he has power, but that he has the wisdom and the maturity to use the power wisely. From an acting point of view, that’s how I approached the part.

I saw, during the midterm campaign of 2006, how difficult it was for opponents of stem cell research to run against hope. And so it was in the 2008 presidential contest. This was hope in the collective, a definition that should always apply to the expression of a people's political will. Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope. In this case, the informing agent was us. Granted, it may all look different in six months to a year, but it is hard not to be buoyed by the desire for positive change as articulated and advanced by Barack Obama. It is okay to hope. This time the aspiration of many will not be derided as desperation by a few, as it was during the stem cell debate of '06. By the time you read this book, President Obama and the 111th Congress will have established federal funding for stem cell research. The dam has broken. Just as I'd hoped.

It is June 27, 1912. You are lying in your bed in the Grand Hotel and it is 6 p.m. on the evening of June 27, 1912. Your mind accepts this absolutely. 6 p.m. on June 27, 1912. Elise McKenna is in this hotel at this very moment. Her manager, William Fawcett Robinson, is in this hotel at this very moment. Now, this moment, here. Both in the Grand Hotel on this evening of June 27, 1912. 6 p.m. on June 27, 1912. Elise McKenna, now, in this hotel. She and her company are in this hotel at this very moment. Now on June 27, 1912, 6 p.m. Your mind accepts this, absolutely. You have traveled back in time, soon you will open your eyes. You will walk into the corridor, and you will go downstairs and you will find Elise McKenna, who is in this hotel at this very moment.

Timing is very important: words can only have a positive effect on others if and when they are ready to listen.

What I didn’t expect was that in this country, home of “Truth, Justice and the American way,” hope would be determined by politics.

A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.” — Christopher Reeve

As Christopher Reeve once said, so many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.

Ralph was tall, affable, and handsome—Christopher Reeve as Superman—and Scout was frumpy, opinionated, and a little overweight, the canine version of Gertrude Stein.

What makes Superman a hero is not that he has power, but that he has the wisdom and the maturity to use the power wisely. From an acting point of view, that’s how I approached the part.” – Christopher Reeve

I read somewhere that Christopher Reeve said one of the ways he knew a part was for him was when he couldn’t stand the idea of anyone else doing it. I know that exact feeling. There’s a sort of manic recognition that happens very rarely when I read something I want so much that I go briefly but totally bonkers. That feeling is a combination of “Hello, old friend” meets EVERYONE GET OUT OF MY WAY SHE’S MINE ALL MINE.

Chris, with Dana steadfastly at his side, would battle back to become both a leader in the fight to cure spinal cord injuries and a symbol of hope for millions.

A hero is someone who commits a courageous action without considering the consequences…

I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles. The fifteen-year-old boy who landed on his head while wrestling with his brother, leaving him paralyzed and barely able to swallow or speak. Travis Roy, paralyzed in the first eleven seconds of a hockey game in his freshman year at college. Harry Steifel, paralyzed from the chest down in a car accident at seventeen, completing his education and working on Wall Street at age thirty-two, but having missed so much of what life has to offer. These are the real heroes, and so are the many families and friends who have stood by them.

Lisa had insisted that Patton Oswalt was right: Batman was the only DC superhero who was allowed to brood. No one else in that ‘verse could do it. Superman was many things but he did not brood. Jeff agreed with her on that score. Christopher Reeve was the only Superman worth caring about. Not that it mattered now. Thank you, Lord, he thought. Thank you for making sure that Zack Snyder will never make another superhero film. You did good. This one time, you did what we asked you to do. Now, Lord… I just need one more favor…

For those who never give up

There should never be a time when you are quick to judge someone with a disability. According to Reeve, a hero is someone who perseveres despite overwhelming obstacles. (Christopher)

Her favorite movie was Somewhere In Time, and she wanted me to be her Christopher Reeve. She probably meant she wanted me to be her Superman, but I always took it like she wanted me to be a guy pretending to need a wheelchair before faking my own death.

Did you ever see that movie with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour? I cried buckets at the end of it. It was so sad and yet so happy in parts, too. I’m such a sucker for stuff like that.

Companies don't want anyone telling them how to deal with their workers  -- they never have; they never will. Stores don't want anyone telling them how to design their entrances; how many steps they can have (or can't have); how heavy their doors can be. Yet they accept their city's building and fire codes, dictating to them how many people they can have in their restaurants, based on square footage, so that the place will not be a fire hazard. They accept that the city can inspect their electrical wiring to ensure that it "meets code" before they open for business. Yet they chafe if an individual wants an accommodation. Because, it seems, it is seen as "special for the handicapped," most of whom likely don't deserve it. Accommodation is fought doubly hard when it is seen to be a way of letting "the disabled" have a part of what we believe is for "normal" people. Although no access code, anywhere, requires them, automatic doors remain the one thing, besides flat or ramped entrances, that one hears about most from people with mobility problems: they need automatic doors as well as flat entrances. Yet no code, anywhere, includes them; mandating them would be "going too far"; giving the disabled more than they have a right to. A ramp is OK. An automatic door? That isn't reasonable. At least that's what the building lobby says. Few disability rights groups, anywhere, have tried to push for that accommodation. Some wheelchair activists are now pressing for "basic, minimal access" in all new single-family housing, so, they say, they can visit friends and attend gatherings in others' homes. This means at least one flat entrance and a bathroom they can get into. De-medicalization No large grocery or hotel firm, no home-and-garden discount supply center would consider designing an entrance that did not include automatic doors. They are standard in hotels and discount warehouses. Not, of course, for the people who literally can not open doors by themselves  -- for such people are "the disabled": them, not us. Firms that operate hotels, groceries and building supply stores fight regulations that require they accommodate "the disabled." Automatic doors that go in uncomplainingly are meant for us, the fit, the nondisabled, to ensure that we will continue to shop at the grocery or building supply center; to make it easy for us to get our grocery carts out, our lumber dollies to our truck loaded with Sheetrock for the weekend project. So the bellhops can get the luggage in and out of the hotel easily. When it is for "them," it is resisted; when it is for "us," however, it is seen as a design improvement. Same item; different purpose

If this hunger to get the same consideration as others seems too whiney in this day and age, consider the statistics: one out of three Americans has daily contact with a person they care about who has a disability. We save money by keeping people in their communities. People with disabilities are actually being placed in nursing homes now because they can't get on a bus to do their own food shopping. It would be far cheaper to force public bus companies to treat shoppers with disabilities more fairly.

Yet laws had been passed, again and again, requiring access  -- full access. New York City and New York state, and California, had some of the strictest access laws in the nation. But often such laws were seen as "feel good" measures. "Disability policy, I've never known any partisan debate on it," Sen. Tom Harkin would say later. Legislators knew their laws would be honored only in the breach, and so it was fine to have them  -- it showed no one was against the handicapped.

Discrimination in places of public accommodation was prohibited under the law  -- but access was to be provided only if it didn't hurt a business too much. It wasn't "discrimination" if the business could "demonstrate that making such modifications would fundamentally alter the nature of such goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations"; or that it would "result in an undue burden"  -- or if the change wasn't "readily achievable"  -- which the law defined as "easily accomplishable and able to be carried out without much difficulty or expense.

No one is against the handicapped" is why disability rights has had so little hearing in this country. The phrase says that there is no animus against disabled people  -- even though they are segregated and kept from full access to society, even though the special programs society affords them make for a much circumscribed life  -- far more circumscribed than what any nondisabled citizen would settle for (we will see this in Chapter 13). The purpose of the phrase is to stifle dissent,

To be regarded as "disabled" in the U.S. is to experience powerlessness on all kinds of levels  -- physical, psychological, political. To be considered disabled is to be put in a supplicant position, the position of the "patient," told to be quiet; if you need something, to ask kindly for it. These are the strictures of disability's Jim Crow. It is really about power: disabled people are considered powerless. Anyone with any savvy is sure to tell others that they don't consider themselves disabled. President Roosevelt called himself a "cured cripple" for that very reason. "If I am talking with a person fairly ignorant of disability rights, and I want to impress upon them that we are legion, I will say, ‘Thirty to 45 percent of the population of this country is disabled,'" professor David Pfeiffer says. "That is a way of getting to the discussion of ‘what is disability'  -- so they will realize that everyone is, or will be, disabled. "But ‘disability' is an ideological term. To name a person as ‘disabled' is to give them an inferior position. In our society people identified as disabled are second-class, third-class, or even worse-class citizens. We live in a constant state of discrimination. Identifying oneself or another person as a ‘person with a disability' is an ideological act. There is no other way to describe it." Which is why not everyone with a functional difference will identify as disabled, he says. Being disabled "is a damning thing.

The complaint against disability rights continued year after year. Rarely rebutted, it was made with equanimity, with self righteousness, because after all, "no one is against the handicapped." The claim that disability rights cost too much, that it hurt non-disabled people, that it warred against common sense, that it allowed people who weren't truly disabled the benefit of its special rights, that it, yes, hurt disabled people themselves, was only made for the disabled's own good, said the critics. No one is against the handicapped. This was paternalism, the particular cloak bigotry wears when it's bigotry against disability. Bigotry with a pat on the head.

I felt as though I had a blind date with destiny, and someone had heard a rumor that destiny looked like Christopher Reeve.

Once you choose hope, anything is possible.” ~ Christopher Reeve as quoted by Marley Applegate.

Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope.

Over the past few years, a loose coalition of advocates like Campbell had accomplished a goal many would have thought impossible. They had pushed through Congress a civil rights law barring discrimination against people with disabilities in jobs, in public services and public accommodations. It had passed almost unanimously, and with President Bush's support.

Why was there so little support for disability rights? It was true that the organized disability rights movement avoided the media. Its leaders felt they had good reason. Most stories about disability were inspirational features about disabled people who had overcome personal affliction with a smile and a bundle of courage, and disability rights advocates said this was not the story they wanted to convey. They seemed to believe, perhaps with justification, that they could not convince reporters or editors of any other approach.

What homeless people with wheelchairs were supposed to do when all that was available to them were inaccessible shelters was never discussed. Were they supposed to continue to live on the street? Most did; they could find neither housing nor homeless shelters they could get into in their wheelchairs. If they were really bad off, they'd go to the emergency room, and from there to a nursing home, where they were kept  -- the nursing home operator getting upwards of $100,000 a year in public money for keeping them there.

The non-handicapped majority says, in effect, "we will extend to you provisional and partial toleration of your public presence  -- as long as you display a continuous, cheerful striving toward ‘normalization.'" "Cheerful" was the key word here, Longmore pointed out. Disabled people couldn't complain, couldn't whimper, and certainly couldn't protest or sue. That wasn't part of the bargain. One could see this bargain's negotiations in progress whenever one observed an interaction between a disabled person and the larger society. It had much in common with the way relationships were conducted in the Jim Crow South. Disabled people who accepted their part of the bargain  -- and the vast majority did  -- went along with society's image of how they were supposed to act.

Special!' Such a pretty word!" Cass Irvin had said. "But what it means is ‘segregated.'" Providing a "special solution for the handicapped" has been the typical response to disability in modern U.S. society  -- to segregate it, separate it, us from them, to make them go away and leave us alone. Special buses. Special Olympics. Very Special Arts. Special education. No matter whether proposed out of genuine if misguided caring or for more selfish motives, it is always very clear, although we don't use the words, that "special" means segregated. Special solutions isolate disabled people from normal society, and nobody pretends they don't. But few seemed to think it should be upsetting to the organized disabled; when they complained they were called selfish. Or unrealistic.

Institutionalization and ‘special housing' At the time of the passage of the ADA, states still had laws on the books requiring people with mental disabilities to be institutionalized. Not even slaves had been so restricted. "Spurred by the eugenics movement," write legal historians Morton Horwitz, Martha Field and Martha Minow, "every state in the country passed laws that singled out people with mental or physical disabilities for institutionalization." The laws made it clear that the state's purpose was not to benefit disabled people but to segregate them from "normal" society. Thus, statutes noted that the disabled were segregated and institutionalized for being a "menace to society" [and] so that "society [might be] relieved from the heavy economic and moral losses arising from the existence at large of these unfortunate persons." "The state of Washington made it a crime for a parent to refuse state-ordered institutionalization," they wrote; "once children were institutionalized, many state laws required parents to waive all custody rights." Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in the 1985 Cleburne Supreme Court decision (the decision saying that people with mental retardation did not constitute a "discrete and insular" minority) that this "regime of state-mandated segregation and degradation [had] in its virulence and bigotry rivaled, and indeed paralleled, the worst excesses of Jim Crow. Massive custodial institutions were built to warehouse the retarded for life." Yet they continue today. In 1999, the Supreme Court in its Olmstead decision acknowledged that the ADA did in fact require states to provide services to people with disabilities in the "most integrated setting"; but institutionalization continued, because federal funds  -- Medicaid, mostly  -- had a built-in "institutional bias," the result of savvy lobbying over the years by owners of institutions like nursing homes: In no state could one be denied a "bed" in a nursing home, but in only a few states could one use those same Medicaid dollars to get services in one's home that were usually much less expensive. Ongoing battles were waged to close down the institutions, to allow the people in them to live on their own or in small group settings. But parents often fought to keep them open. When they did close, other special facilities cropped up.

Although the move to deinstitutionalization had begun in the 1960s in the wake of findings of abuse and horrid conditions in the large warehouses  -- people tied to beds, lying in their own feces; people covered with bruises and abrasions from beatings; people with sores infested with maggots  -- those who should have been most horrified at the conditions, the parents of those who were kept there, often fought to keep them open. Critics charged that the parents simply wanted them open so they would not have to deal with offspring they saw only as burdens, that this was why they had put them there in the first place. It was a fact that those wanting to keep the warehouses open were invariably the families of the people who were housed in them. The families downplayed the reports of abuse and foul conditions. Just as officials had insisted the special New York streetside toilets be kept locked for the safety of the disabled, the families worried that life in "the community" (which was how the organized disabled referred to the move to have such people live in small groups of three or four in a neighborhood, with helpers) would be unsafe for their offspring.

The Department of Justice was charged with enforcing the 1980 Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, but did little. Poor enforcement had led to Congressional investigations in 1983 and 1985; in a 1984 issue of the Nebraska Law Review, Robert Dinerstein wrote that "as a result of …its utter failure to enforce CRIPA, The Department of Justice has manifestly failed to extend to institutionalized disabled persons the rights that are properly theirs." John Kip Cornwell, writing in the November 1987 Yale Law Review, leveled similar charges, as did the University of Minnesota's Mary Hayden in 1998, over a decade later. She said the DOJ relied too much on conciliation, showing "solicitousness for the prerogatives of state officials or parents who support institutionalization" rather than for the people who were being kept in the institutions.

Those who made excuses for Jerry Lewis didn't recognize disability bigotry when they saw it, insisted attorney Harriet Johnson, who had one of the diseases Jerry was curing. "When bigotry is part of mainstream culture, it feels like ‘the way things are.'" My grandfather's generation of white men in the South didn't recognize sexism. They thought women really were magnolia blossoms requiring protection. They didn't recognize racism either. They thought African Americans really were inherently inferior, suitable to menial work, and that the structures of segregation were for the good of both races. They'd say it wasn't prejudice, but the way things are. This is where we are with disability today. Lewis says he uses pity because, hey, we're pitiful. And people agree. If you don't see the profound animus in Jerry Lewis's statement, try substituting the minority group. What if he said, "If you don't want to be bashed for being gay, stay in your house"? Or, "If you don't want to be groped for being a broad, stay in your house"? Or  -- if you believe the "charity" work excuses hate  -- consider this scenario. What if the United Negro College Fund hired a white comedian to raise money from white people, using bigotry. "Give because they're so stupid, so hopelessly ignorant, they need their own schools to keep them out of our schools." Would the success of such a pitch justify it? Or would we recognize that the more it succeeds  -- the more people buy into it  -- the more harm it does? I think  -- I hope  -- we're at a point now where people would be up in arms if one of those other minority groups were treated with such profound disrespect, for decades, by a charity ostensibly dedicated to "helping" them. But with disability, it's a lesson yet to be learned.

Almost everyone who experienced disability and who had been the subject of a feature story (and a vast percentage of people considered "truly disabled" had been profiled in their local newspapers or on their local TV news programs) had found reporters turning their accounts of bigotry, social ostracism, prejudice, discrimination into stories of inspiration and overcoming, either glossing over  -- or never noticing  -- aspects of the story that knit it into the larger fabric of nationwide disability discrimination. A story a wheelchair user told a reporter about being denied job after job ended up not as a piece on the issue of job discrimination but a feature on the pluckiness of the disabled jobseeker.

A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles. —Christopher Reeve