This book is an anthology of 167 quotes from Helen Keller and 67 selected facts about Helen Keller. A very healthy baby, Helen was born June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama to retired army Captain Arthur Keller and his second wife, Kate. Her father, Arthur H. Keller, had served as a captain for the Confederate Army. Her paternal grandmother was the second cousin of Robert E. Lee. Her mother, Kate Adams, was the daughter of Charles W. Adams, who fought for the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, earning the rank of colonel and acting brigadier-general. Her paternal lineage was traced to Casper Keller, a native of Switzerland. One of Helen’s Swiss ancestors was the first teacher for the deaf in Zurich. Helen Keller had her eyes replaced with glass eyes when she was 30. Helen Keller learned German, Latin, Greek, and French before she graduated from Radcliffe College. Helen Keller helped promote the use of Braille among blind people. In 1902, Helen Keller became the first person who was deaf and blind to write a book. Her autobiography, The Story of My Life, was the first of 14 books she wrote in her lifetime. “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.” “It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision.” “Do not think of today’s failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow.” “A bend in the road is not the end of the road…Unless you fail to make the turn.” “A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.” “While they were saying it couldn’t be done, it was done.” “You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.” “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” “Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail.”
