Quotes About Overcoming

I was a D student in high school and on the dean's list in college.

I was black, studying physics and engineering. I was from a small school nobody ever heard of.

You can't control all the crazy stuff that happens to you. All you can control is the way you handle it.

I think that all of the deep, intense things, a lot of different abuse, and all kinds of crazy stuff - I think it made me really strong and it made me learn how to appreciate every day, appreciate people in my life, so it's just another good example of sometimes bad things make us appreciate the beautiful every day.

As a black woman I always felt growing up I had to do above and beyond stuff to be noticed, to feel like I could hang with everybody else.

Every stumble is not a fall, and every fall does not mean failure.

I don't stumble at any hurdle.

Sometimes you stumble when you push yourself harder and you're trying to run faster or whatever. We forgive ourselves, pick ourselves up, and keep running. We don't cry and stop running because we skinned our knee.

You never want to have a stumble, but it happens sometimes. It happens, and you get through things.

Banging my feet against the snow to get a grip on the ice, I damaged my artificial leg stump. On several occasions my artificial leg turned 180 degrees and I had to put it back to its normal position which slowed me down. I had to crawl along the slope to move forward, annoying the climbers behind me.

Because I'm no longer a pop star 24 hours a day, I'm no longer bogged down by the stupid stuff that used to cripple me. I don't bruise easily any more.

I remember once being told by a casting person, years ago, that I shouldn't pursue a career in the business because of the color of my skin. The fact that I remember it today means it stuck with me. I thought that was really stupid advice and advice nobody should ever give someone.

I had a bad stutter when I was really young. I couldn't get a sentence out. Like, 'D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-ad.' And that turned into a mumble.

I didn't stutter when I was reading lines in a script. When I got away from myself, I didn't have that problem.

Well, no, you can prepare it all you want, but I'd still stutter.

You can hear me starting to stutter and slur my words.

It's nothing to be ashamed of to have a stutter.

Part of what was in the ether all around me growing up, until I was between 19 and 20, was a terrible, debilitating stutter. It was part of what made me very reclusive as a kid.

But now I've been in the arena for 47 years and I stutter less today than I did in those days.

I don't think I ever felt an outsider when I had a stutter.

A large part of me becoming a performer was a make-or-break way of getting over that stutter. I sometimes wonder if, subliminally, that was part of the reason I got into the business, and the more I became a performer and grew in confidence, the less pronounced the stutter became.

When I was younger, I had a terrible problem with stuttering.

I used to feel that everything I know I learned through my lifelong struggle with stuttering; I now feel this way about my damn back.

I don't want to be submerged by depression.