Quotes About Stigma

I don't think just being skinny means necessarily anorexic.

It's better to be skinny than to be fat.

People are branded as either 'fat' or 'skinny' from an early age. You sort of never shake it, even if you end up losing weight.

Sadly, people assume that I am happy because I am so skinny.

Vulnerable is a catch-all word like "love" and "schizophrenia."

The enormous expectation having to do with sexual love and the shame involved in this expectation degrades all a woman's perspectives from the start.

The history of epilepsy can be summarised as 4,000 years of ignorance, superstition and stigma followed by 100 years of knowledge, superstition and stigma.

I was pretty certain that the man in the seat across the aisle was a smoker—he looked suitably out of sorts—and even more sure that the young man ahead of me must be. I have yet to meet a grown-up reader of comic books who does not also have an affection for tobacco and tattoos.

You could see in an instant that she had been the local good-time girl since about 1931. She had "Ready for Sex" written all over her face, but "Better Bring a Paper Bag" written all over her body.

don't know whether the people in these towns pronounce them that way because they are backward, undereducated shitkickers who don't know any better or whether they know better but don't care that everybody thinks they are backward undereducated shitkickers.

If you took all the young men in southern England with those caps and that slouch and collected them all together in one room, you still wouldn't have enough IQ points to make a halfwit.

New Rule: Designers of women's Halloween costumes must admit that they're not even trying. They just choose a random profession, like nurse or referee, and put the word sexy in front of it, thereby perpetuating the idea of Halloween as a day when normally shy women release their inner sluts and parade around like vixens, and I just completely forgot what I was complaining about.

this was one of those rare "Wow, maybe these black guys aren't all on drugs; they actually seem like normal people" moments that the NBA needed so desperately in order to connect with secretly-still-a-little-racist America

Kafir is not a neutral word. Instead, it defines a subhuman, so it is bigoted and biased.

People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy.

But the fact that I couldn't hold my job was worrisome. I was probably crazy. I'd been skirting the idea of craziness for a year or two, now I was closing in on it. Pull yourself together! I told myself. Stop indulging yourself. There's nothing wrong with you. You're just wayward.

The question was, What could we do? Could we get up every morning and take showers and put on clothes and go to work? Could we think straight? Could we not say crazy things when they occurred to us? Some of us could; some of us couldn't. In the world's terms, though, all of us were tainted.

He just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like.

Whore or courtesan, she put on a great little show.

Doctor Nolan had said, quite bluntly, that a lot of people would treat me gingerly, or even avoid me, like a leper with a warning bell. My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.

Still, I imagined myself going to some Boston priest--it would have to be Boston, because I didn't want any priest in my home town to know I'd thought of killing myself. Priests were terrible gossips.

The only quiet woman is a dead one

Foras Road has a sordid reputation (…) Old crones sat in doorways, while their daughters were pushed out to earn money. It is intriguing that a society which is very covert with sexuality should be so straightforward about prostitution.

She felt stupid, though she knew she wasn't. She was intelligent, had always been an A student and an overachiever. The fact that her short-term memory came and went didn't make her less intelligent. It just made her feel that way—which made her think other people would feel the same way about her. They would think of her as brain-damaged.