Quotes About Inclusion

When I started publishing my work, one of the biggest surprises to me was the recurring question about my background and why I wasn't doing more stories about Asian-Americans.

Why is being a woman so surprising? There are two sexes. A man and a woman. So, if it's not a man in a movie, what else was it going to be?

I hadn't looked at all the Nobel Prizes and thought, my goodness, there's no women. So it was a little bit surprising to me.

Scripts specify 'minority' when it doesn't seem necessary. Given this is a traditionally liberal and progressive industry, it's surprisingly backwards.

I just don't know when, as a society... it sort of only became OK to represent gay people in the traditional sense, where they have a great job and well-adjusted parents and maybe a surrogate or adopted child. When was that the only way you could represent gay people?

I'm part Chinese, part Hawaiian, part Filipino, and part nigger. You'd hate to be me

Marriage equality is a threat: to inequality. It's a book to everyone who values and benefits from equality. It's for all of us.

We are, as a culture, moving to a future with more people and more voices and more possibilities. Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future.

I got something most women got, an experience of staring at women across a distance or being in worlds in which they barely existed, from Moby-Dick to Lord of the Rings. Being so often required to be someone else can stretch thin the sense of self. You should be yourself some of the time. You should be with people who are like you, who are facing what you're facing, who dream your dreams and fight your battles, who recognize you.

the outsiders stick together because their differences from each other are insignificant in the face of their differences from a hostile mainstream.

The two most basic goals of social utopias are to eliminate deprivation—hunger, ignorance, homelessness—and to forge a society in which no one is an outsider, no one is alienated.

If libraries hold all the stories that have been told, there are ghost libraries of all the stories that have not. The ghosts outnumber the books by some unimaginably vast sum. Even those who have been audible have often earned the privlage through strategic silences or the inability to hear certain voices, including their own.

This is what we mean by democracy: that everyone has a voice, that no one gets away with things just because of their wealth, power, race, or gender.

A book without women is often said to be about humanity but a book with women in the foreground is a woman's book.

Marriage equality is a threat: to inequality. It's a boon to everyone who values and benefits from equality. It's for all of us.

Glorious theater. It creates family for all kinds of orphans.

Wade Coenen poured her a glass of brandy. 'Theater,' he said. 'Glorious theater. It creates family for all kinds of orphans.

Glorious theater. It creates family for all kinds of orphans. -- Wade Coenen in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Ils étaient onze, deux Noirs, deux Jaunes, quatre Blancs, et trois allant du café au lait à l'huile d'olive. Mais leurs onze sangs mêlés dans une coupe n'eussent fait qu'un seul sang rouge.

Religion engenders both inclusion and exclusion. It spawns as much conflict in society as it does cohesion.

Jesus, on the other hand, was America. He was the central figure in America's national drama. Accepting him into my heart was as close as I could get to feeling truly American.

Ezekiel declared, "in the center of all nations

Indeed, everything that is currently being said about America's diverse Muslim population—that they are foreign and exotic and un-American—was said about Catholic and Jewish immigrants nearly a century ago.

Yet, there is no such push to get more women into coal mines, offshore drilling, or on garbage trucks.