Teri Garr Quotes

I was ostracized by my community.

I saw in my life what pushed a lot of people to drugs was being an outcast to society, so being gay I related to that.

Everyone picked on me in school because I was in foster care.

The doctor gave me several warnings: Never tell anyone unless necessary, because I might be ostracized. Call it 'seizure disorder,' not epilepsy, because fewer people would be frightened. Try to choose a profession as free from stress as possible.

I came from Yale, where you get an extracurricular degree in self-importance because you went there. When AIDS happened, I was treated like an outcast. And I don't like that feeling.

I am a man of a thousand faces, all of them blacklisted.

In addition to pain, disability, and disfigurement, lymphatic filariasis carries a heavy social cost. Those disfigured by the disease are often shunned. Women are often rejected by their families. Both men and women can have difficulty finding jobs.

With my childhood, it's a wonder I'm not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

When one woman found out I had multiple sclerosis, she said to me, 'My heart bleeds for you.' I said to her, 'Well, my heart bleeds for you, because you're an idiot.'

I took the test for AIDS. I began to hate people who were not sick. Those people are monsters, I would think, believing that they are well because of moral superiority, because they are good. I identified with the loneliness of the sick. I felt that there was something pure about them.

I know what it's like to feel marginalized and defeated and humiliated by suffering from a mental illness.

Growing up as a gay boy in West Texas, I definitely felt like a bit of an outcast sometimes - that there was a world that I would never be a part of.

Pick any scientific field, and you'll find that those snubbed by their communities, left feeling alone and despised, were often those on the forefront.

I don't think there's much tolerance for people who are a little different or withdrawn or quiet. They always seem to be the ones who stick out the most, the ones who want to just shy away and withdraw.

Most people I know stopped talking to me after I came out.

The prejudice surrounding AIDS exacts a social death which precedes the actual physical one.

I only had the right to sit in the shadows of the world,in complete silence. Whether I was laughed at, or told I was discusting, or thought of as unpleasant I would sit in the shadows.

I don't feel like I've ever been in mainstream society.

I always think that there's a weight of prejudice from the past that gay people perhaps carry around with them. Even if it doesn't exist so much around them, they still have a feeling of being excluded, and perceived prejudice is almost as unsettling as actual prejudice.

I am a marked person, and no one who's unmarked is going to understand that. It's very intimidating. I don't even know what my place is anymore. What's my role in society? Who am I, after everybody has branded me?

Since I can remember, being different was always hard around normal people. That's just how it is, whether you have vitiligo, a deformity, or a different way of thinking or dressing. It's going to always be weird for normal people.

The term stigma and its synonyms conceal a double perspective: does the stigmatized individual assume his differentness is known about already or is evident on the spot, or does he assume it is neither known about by those present nor immediately perceivable by them?

Paradoxically, by insisting on engaging with Muslims as a separate group, the authorities make many of them feel even more excluded.

Whenever you tell a group of people that they can't use bathrooms, or they can't access spaces that other people use, that is dehumanizing. It is discriminatory, and it reinforces the stigma and the prejudices that the transgender community already faces.

I lost most of my friends. Their parents had told them to stay away from me, because they said I was crazy, I was an extremist.