Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Masur

Masur’s bluntness is the point: he’s not offering a poetic metaphor about silence, he’s trying to break a lazy, hearing-centric shortcut. “No relation to sound” reads like an overcorrection until you hear the target of his frustration: the assumption that deafness is simply hearing turned down to zero. By insisting it’s “a totally different mental process,” he’s re-framing deaf experience as its own cognitive and cultural system, not a deficit version of the dominant one.

The intent feels practical, almost actorly in its focus on interiority. An actor lives and dies by how a character processes the world; Masur is arguing that you can’t authentically represent deaf characters (or understand Deaf people) if you keep imagining them as people constantly haunted by the absence of sound. The subtext is a warning against well-meaning but flattening empathy: “I can’t hear, therefore I must be missing what you have.” He’s pushing toward the opposite: I’m not missing your experience; I’m having mine.

Context matters here. In late-20th-century disability conversations, deafness was often framed through medical correction and “overcoming.” Masur’s phrasing aligns more with a cultural-linguistic view associated with Deaf identity and sign languages: perception, language, memory, and attention can organize differently when sound isn’t the primary channel. The line is provocative because it doesn’t ask for pity or inspiration; it demands a conceptual upgrade.