Daniel Woodrell Quotes

I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.

I don't like anything in the mainstream and they don't like me.

What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.

I'm in prison. But my heart and mind is free. Gangsta haters on the streets are doing more time than me. They need 30 police escorts with them every time they walk down the street.

Being an outsider means not being heard, not having a voice. It means being treated as a second-class citizen, being diminished in the eyes of others. We have all felt this way at one time or another, but some feel it more consistently. Unfortunately, our schools often do not embrace the talents of many of their occupants.

The feeling of being an underdog, not belonging, is very much me. You harbour a little feeling of resentment towards the 'upper dog'.

Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I've always had the advantage of alienation.

When someone lives as a minority, they experience the world differently than those of us who live in the majority. We may occupy the same physical space, but we don't occupy the same psychic space.

Though a man escape every other danger, he can nether wholly escape those who do not want such a person as he to exist.

An ethnic minority is much more vulnerable when it is accused of being a fifth column.

Oppression thrives on distance - on not actually meeting or seeing the oppressed.

I don't think it's helpful to put them all in a box and say people are evil and freaks because they have gotten to the point where they have fallen out of the community of what it is to be a human being. That's worthy of investigation.

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

There is an element in some of my work that has to do with being an outsider, feeling like not part of the dominant culture.

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.

We will put a stop to the 'Dadagiri' of people of U.P. and Bihar in Maharashtra.

The way we imagine discrimination or disempowerment often is more complicated for people who are subjected to multiple forms of exclusion. The good news is that intersectionality provides us a way to see it.

Every progressive movement in U.S. history has been portrayed negatively by the media at the time it happened.

The people that are the invisible ones, the marginalized, the quote-unquote weirdos, the people that get things thrown at them, the people that get harassed every day just for existing . . . I just still strongly align with them.

This boy thinks I am not of his species, that I am some other kind of creature, one that can be crushed under the weight of a phone book. The pain is not great, but the symbolism is disagreeable.

We seem to be pariahs alike in the visible and the invisible world, with no foothold anywhere, though by every principle of government and religion we should have an equal place on this planet.

Who makes and keeps the Jew or the Negro base, who but you, who exclude them from the rights which others enjoy?

Hinduism has sinned in giving sanction to untouchability.

Whilst the Bihar calamity damages the body, the calamity brought about by untouchability corrodes the very soul.

Untouchability is an error of long standing.