Quotes About Stigma

That's what they do to whatever I was - 19 or something. You're the baby hooker. You can ask any woman my age and we've all played baby hookers.

[On middle age:] ... the very real possibility for you of growing fat as you near death and thus being seen by everyone while you are both DEAD AND FAT.

What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it—like a secret vice!

Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.

I'm the only one sitting alone, under the glowing neon sign which reads, "Complete and Total Loser, Not Quite Sane. Stay Away. Do Not Feed.

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

She [Mrs. Hines] stood before the door as if she were barring them from the house--a dumpy, fat little woman with a round face like dirty and unovened dough, and a tight screw of scant hair.

We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.

Cause shame was what we always felt, me and all my girlfriends, for expecting sex to breed complicity. ("Complicity is like a girl's name," writes Dodie Bellamy).

There is no cell culture for depression. You can't see it on a bone scan or an x-ray. Not everyone with depression will show the same behavioral symptoms.

Certain peer pressures encourage little fingers to learn how to hold a football instead of a crayon. Rumors circulate around the schoolyard: kids who draw or wear white socks and bring violins to school on Wednesdays might have cooties. I confess to having yielded to these pressures.

This compulsion to undertand seems to me like a stigma that I cannot get rid of and that isolates me from other people. Medea knew about such things.

Boys who have been shamed tend to act out, while girls turn their shame inward, often creating depression, eating disorders, or perfectionism.

Mamey said that in her day a woman who had not married by the age of thirty was called a thornback, named after a flat, spiny, prehistoric-looking fish.

But being a boy is not a social disease.

To me, there is very little sex in toilets.

Mine is an unusual case, although the condition is not so rare as the average person would think. It is more a problem of social taboos and the desire not to speak of the subject, because it deals with the great "hush-hush," namely, Sex.

Norma, 1930s. "Whores make good wives, but madams don't. When you're making money in a whorehouse, that makes you independent and hard to get along with as a wife in the first place.

Because the doctors could not cure me, they decided I could not be sick. They told me it was all in my head. Namely, I was to blame. I was the sickness.

and unfortunately most women did not seem to have the same urges. Or if they did, they wouldn't admit it. They probably didn't, anyway. But if they did they wouldn't admit it.

chapter 1. There is a stigma attached to being anything less than perfect, and we feel exposed when we find out through critiques that we aren't.

Recent surveys suggest that 25–30 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from a mental disorder, and that for most of them this is the direct effect of stress. Yet because of stigma, less than half of them seek help—

We unfortunately seem to be unconsciously biased against those in the society who come out on the bottom.

Dear Commendatory Roomers, you have no idea how many people-serious, decently behaved, cultivated people- go looking for the company of whores