Unacknowledged Struggles Quotes

It was hard to admit I had a problem when I still had money, property, prestige. How can I have a problem when I'm driving my new Mercedes, and it's paid for, and I have a house at Malibu?

You don't know the demons people deal with, and you just have no idea.

One of the things that free people do is engage in conspiracies of silence about problems that do not seem solvable.

People think I'm all calm, but underneath I'm not.

I don't think it would be very difficult for me to open the chapters of my life because there isn't much there.

Everyone thinks I am rich, I have a plush office, I make advertisements and travel - but only I know the kinds of problems I face.

I think there is this whole part of America that people overlook. I think they know it's there, but they tend to overlook it, become ignorant to it, and refuse to see it for what it is.

I am representing here - the sound of silence. The cry of innocence. And, the face of invisibility. I represent millions of those children who are left behind, and that's why I have kept an empty chair here as a reminder.

It is not I who have been consigned to the bedroom of history.

I've always been interested in the idea of people who fell through the cracks.

I think black women feel an obligatory pressure to be stronger than everybody else, not necessarily to suppress the pain.

I gravitate to the world's outcasts.

I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.

There's just an incredible amount of loneliness as a mother, all this solitude no one really speaks to.

My mother and my father have been married 50 years, and he's just started to understand that something's wrong with the system. He accepted the whole thing, you see. Yet this industrious kind of engagement didn't bring him the success, according to American terms, that he wanted. I was probably affected by this very much. In fact, I know I was.

Men always suffer when women are ignorant. They suffer more than women, not only because women are stronger than men and more resistant, but because men are peculiarly vulnerable to the damage ignorant women can do at the periods of their life when they most need intelligent and wise care: in infancy, in adolescence, in times of illness and mental and emotional crisis, and in old age.

I was taught you don't tell your secrets to strangers - certainly not secrets that expose error, weakness, failure. My generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public.

For teenage kids, they feel a pressure to sweep things under the rug because they feel like they're not important enough to have problems.

The invisible dilemma is that men face the very real problem that they don't feel comfortable bringing these issues up and they tend not to be acknowledged at work.

My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.

A lot of what happens in the world is full-on crazy and doesn't get reported on.

There are so many things we don't know about because they don't get spoken about, and people might be embarrassed to speak up or might be shamed into not speaking up.

One ought to begin an analysis of power from the ground up, at the level of tiny local events where battles are unwittingly enacted by players who don't know what they are doing.

One of the lies that we tell ourselves is that we're making progress; but Huey's chair's empty.

I don't want my grandchildren to go through what I went through.