Quotes About Stigma

The pinball business was dirty, they said; pachinko gave off a strong odor of poverty and criminality

I think sometimes people think cheerful is a synonym for dumb, so no one is ever cheerful.

And the scary thing I have noticed is that some people really feel uncomfortable around women who don't hate themselves.

depression is something that I've come to accept from my creative community and I realize that's probably alien to most people. I don't know why the funniest people I know are also depressed.

There is no difference between Ripley from Alien and any Katherine Heigl character.

As everyone knows, depressed people are some of the most boring people in the world. I know this because when I was depressed, people fled. Except my best friends.

No words to tell my students about that, or the children taken away, or the threats of violence. No way to say, Any woman who steps outside the confines of womanhood will be called a lesbian.

We children of schizophrenics are the great secret keepers, the ones who don't want you to think that anything is wrong.

Alcoholism is a disease, but it's the only one you can get yelled at for having. "Goddamn it, Otto, you are an alcoholic." "Goddamn it, Otto, you have Lupus." One of those two doesn't sound right.

She said in an interview with Polly Devlin in 1983 that the pseudonym was essential because, 'for a woman to read a book, let alone write one, was viewed with alarm; I would have been banned from every respectable house.

When people are drunk the first time you meet them, you are inclined to think of them as permanent dipsomaniacs

So I think it's - what was important to me is that I found that I can't change the fact that people already have made an opinion about me. But I don't think that should stop me from trying to correct some of the misperceptions that are out there.

Cripples are not the stuff of romance. Only Lord Byron, dragging his club foot, springs to mind as an exception to the rule, but such a failing in a man is regarded as interesting, even provocative, rather than disfiguring. Women must submit to a more exacting measure.

What is shameful cannot be shared. What is shameful, separates.

Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill. And some people, like John Nash, are both.

Es terrible que estuviéramos tan asustadas de que nos vieran con libros que tenemos todo el derecho a leer

For most Americans of the eighteenth century, it was assumed impossible for a servant to shed his lowly origins; the meaner sort, as one newspaper insisted, could never "wash out the stain of servility." There were fears that the meaner sort were treading too close on the heels of those above them.

Every era in the continent's vaunted developmental story had its own taxonomy of waste people-unwanted and unsalvageable. Each era had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from the mainstream ideal.

But today's trailer trash are merely yesterday's vagrants on wheels, an updated version of Okies in jalopies and Florida crackers in their carts. They are renamed often, but they do not disappear.

Populated by what many dismissed as "useless lubbers" (conjuring the image of sleepy and oafish men lolling about doing nothing), North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony. Despite being English, despite having claimed the rights of freeborn Britons, lazy lubbers of Poor Carolina stood out as a dangerous refuge of waste people, and the spawning ground of a degenerate breed of Americans.14

1929, with his appearance in the movie Hearts in Dixie, the very visible African American actor known as Stepin Fetchit began a film career in which he popularized for an entire generation the crude stereotype of laziness suggested by his on-screen name.

A North Carolina journalist neatly summed up the identity confusion: "If you think you're a redneck, you think you're hardworking, fun-loving, and independent. If you don't think you're a redneck, you think they're loud, obnoxious, bigoted, and shallow.

At all times, white trash remind us of one of the American nation's uncomfortable truths: the poor are always with us. A preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises—the dream of upward mobility—and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable.

North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony.