Munira Mirza Quotes

Never, ever, have I felt really accepted in Hollywood.

When we talk about communities, we seldom discuss the margins. But for every person nestled comfortably in the bosom of a community, there is someone else on the outskirts, feeling ambivalent. Ambiguous. Excluded. Unwilling or unable to come more fully into the fold.

I was taunted because I was different.

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?

There are people in our society who should be separated and discarded.

I'm an outsider. I will always be an outsider.

I suppose when you are an outsider, you will always be an outsider.

It's a clique that I've never been a part of. It's not like I identify them in a negative way.

I don't consider myself a pariah.

I know what it feels like to be an outsider.

The law of dislike for the unlike will always prevail…unlike is normally situated at a safe distance.

In South Africa, I feel I am a stranger, at best an animal.

I've experienced a great deal of, you know, ostracism from the making of films.

I feel as though there's a lot invested in my background in being an outsider.

I felt like I was an outsider growing up in the black church, as a gay man, in a poor community.

Well, I've always felt connected to the outsider.

I was ostracized by my community.

At that moment in time when we feel like the other, we were not the person embraced, not one of the cool kids, not in the club - when you're that person, it makes you feel smaller, and when they persecute you as a result, that's a difficult position to be in.

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?

You look around, and you think, 'Given the chance, if we can get away with it, people are going to be nasty to each other. They're going to pull up the draw bridge; they're going to draw up the ladder and try to live in this little bubble without giving anything to anyone else - without even receiving anything from anyone else.'

The trouble with me is that I'm an outsider. And that's a very hard thing to be in American life.

I always felt like I had the word "illegal" tattooed on my forehead.

Ostracism means you don't exist at all. And that's a very difficult situation to live with. As gay people, we had been chasing ostracism by that point for probably 300 years. You just knew that you should have dropped into your black hole.

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.

Wherever I go, people ask: 'What is she? What is she?' There has always been an agenda - they're excluding me or including me in something with that question. It is the first thing agents in Los Angeles ask me. And then I'd hear: 'You're not black enough, you're too black, you're Italian - no, you're Spanish.'