Quotes About Stigma

You're depressed, not crazy. It's not insane to be depressed in this world. It's more sane than being happy.

They blame the low-income women for ruining the country because they're staying home with their children and not going out to work. They blame the middle-income women for ruining the country because they go out to work and do not stay home to take care of their children.

Witches, warlocks, gremlins, orgres - they're just words,labels. Haven't you noticed that when people are labelled, their faces disappear?

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.

The reason that there are so few women comics is that so few women can bear being laughed at.

My mother says that smart women are always crazy.

Many of these accounts became popular with the American public, and family clans like "The Jukes" and "The Kallikaks" became widely known, entering the public imagination as poor, dirty, drunken, criminally minded, and sexually perverse people.

I identified with both women. But Emma had a stronger message for the women I want to speak to now women who work. I wanted to tell them that choosing to work doesn't make them oddballs and isn't antisocial.

But if one says: I cannot come because it is my hour to be alone, one is considered rude, egotistical or strange. 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.

Val is a bachelor farmer in his seventies, so he should, by rights, be half mad.

After three more years, she was released from the asylum, rattling with pills – a much reduced, soon to be terminally ill woman who was invisible, on the street, to those who passed her by.

asks whether an infected child can live in an orphanage. "They still think HIV is caught like a cold

he can't reveal he has AIDS in his village, or he would be ostracized and lose his job as a mechanic.

most people would not trust a drunken prostitute like Daise. Would you have two weeks ago?' She blinked at him. 'I don't know.' She hadn't even thought about prostitutes, drunken or not, two weeks ago. 'That could be me on the corner were things different.' She swallowed. 'Or if they go differently, it still could. I would want someone to believe me.

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

I never confess to being a widow. Widows are thought to be unlucky in some societies, while in others, the local men get over-optimistic ideas.)

Don't worry if they say you're crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I knew. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It's a good thing to know - no matter what they call it.

flexibility cannot be the solution to work-life issues as long as it is stigmatized. The question that young people should be asking their employers is not what kinds of family-friendly policies a particular firm has. Instead, they should ask, "How many employees take advantage of these policies? How many men? And how many women and men who have worked flexibly have advanced to top positions in the firm?

Neither of us had mentioned the word abortion, not even once. This thing had no place in language.

Je n'estimais pas que Jean T. m'avait traitée avec mépris. Pour lui, j'étais passée de la catégorie des filles dont on ne sait pas si elles acceptent de coucher à celle des filles qui, de façon indubitable, ont déjà couché.

Si tuviera que representar en un cuadro aquel acontecimiento de mi vida, pintaría una mesita de formica pegada a la pared y, encima de ella, una palangana esmaltada en la que flota una sonda roja. Ligeramente a la derecha se encuentra un cepillo de pelo. No creo que exista un solo Taller de la abortera en ningún museo del mundo.)

Girls who abort and unwed mothers from working-class Rouen were handed the same treatment.

Ni lui ni moi n'avions prononcé le mot avortement une seule fois. C'était une chose qui n'avait pas de place dans le langage.

We are ALL sexually abused by virtue of the fact that we live in a sex-negative society.