Quotes About Stigma

Delegations from all over the world visit Homeboy Industries and scratch their heads as we tell them of our difficulty in placing our people in jobs after their time with us. Americans' seeming refusal to believe in a person's ability to redeem himself strikes these folks as foreign indeed.

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock.

At the age of one, I was already heavier than most: doctors told my mum that she should start feeding me differently to the advice given by the health visitor. Yet I ate healthily, nothing was processed, and I was active and happy. But for whatever reason, I was on the bigger side.

Fat people are so rarely included in visual culture that fat is perceived as a blot on the landscape of sleek and slim.

When my novels are packaged as exclusively for women, I'm not only cut off from a vital portion of my audience but clearly labelled as an author the literary establishment is free to dismiss.

I feel like mental health is not something people are vocal enough about, but it's something that everyone struggles with.

I went to a vocational high school, which is where they basically train you to go out and dig ditches. You gotta learn a trade. Well, why do you gotta learn a trade? Because you're not smart enough to go to college. That was the underlying gist of it.

I think, for a long time, people just did not know what to do with me. I looked like a Barbie doll, and then I had this voice like I spend my life in a bar, and I said things that were alarming and had ideas that didn't make sense.

I feel, in our culture, the girl with any sort of power is called 'difficult' or various words that are demeaning just because she has a voice, has confidence, and stands for her rights. It is sad, but it is the truth of our country.

I've done a handful of voiceover and on-camera jobs where I've been asked to 'be blacker.' That's code for sassier, more ghetto, more neck rolls and snaps.

We have for too long been taught that the sight of a man speaking to himself is a sign of eccentricity or madness; we are no longer at all habituated to our own voices, except in conversation or from within the safety of a shouting crowd.

Schizophrenia is hearing voices, not doing voices.

I think older women's voices are the most hated voices in the world - whether it's because people are reminded of their mothers or what, I don't know.

There will always be people who think volleyball, at least for boys anyway, is a sport you play when you can't letter in anything else.

In many parts of this country, there is still a stigma about volleyball, that it is a sissy game, the one to go out for if you can't win a letter in anything else. People don't realize what a difference there is between the picnic game and the top level.

The whole romanticized 'sad clown' thing, we gotta get rid of that. That has to go! That's just getting sick people to voluntarily stay sicker and sadder than they have to be.

I should be allowed to be voluptuous or scrawny of my own volition, without people going on about it.

In court, judges tell people that their conviction carries a sentence of years, or probation. The truth is far more terrible. People convicted of crimes often become social outcasts for life, finding it difficult or impossible to rent an apartment, get a job, adopt children, access public benefits, serve on juries, or vote.

If women speak their mind, then they are termed as trouble makers or attention seekers.

I wanted to write in film or something like that. I thought acting was an embarrassing thing to say you wanted to do, especially when you're young. It seemed really uncool.

I didn't breast-feed. I'm selfish.

There's nothing that sells good about Allen Iverson if it's something positive about Allen Iverson.

There are still parts of the country where it's hard: when you realize you're gay, it's like a death sentence.

Serbia is blamed in advance for everything.