Autobiographers From The United States

"I did pottery well because of the disciplined work habits instilled by my parents. Pottery as it was taught to me at that time required a student to know clay compositions , glaze chemistry and proportions of mineral oxides, the ability to throw pottery on the wheel, then trim and decorate it, the ability to apply glazes, to stack and unstack a kiln, the ability to tend to firing it to maturity-all this by myself."

"For my whole life I had been bound by the tenets of Chinese culture. To be an artist was the option which would enable me ... to be free of Chinese culture’s relentless subjugation of women."

"To neglect those who, through no fault of their own, are in need, runs counter to our values, our decency and equality. Today, with our knowledge and expertise, we have a great opportunity to change things forever, for all people with mental illnesses, with what we know now, to move forward to a new era of understanding, care and respect."

"I wanted to take mental illnesses and emotional disorders out of the closet, to let people know it is all right to admit having a problem without fear of being called crazy. If only we could consider mental illnesses as straightforwardly as we do physical illnesses, those affected could seek help and be treated in an open and effective way."

"Scientific advancements over the past three decades have greatly improved our understanding of the causes, nature, and treatment of many diseases and disabilities, including mental illnesses. Attention to the social determinants of health has led to the identification of risk factors and underlying causes of disadvantage and illness. Technology has made possible unparalleled public access to information so that more and more Americans know that treatments work and are available. Additionally, social networking provides multiple platforms from which advocates and consumers can organize and unite efforts to improve quality of life and address issues such as resiliency and recovery."

"Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished."

"American women have increasingly realized — as have men — the impact our opinions have in the voting booth and the marketplace. We have united to impact politics and policy, but also importantly to use our influence to help the poor, the oppressed, and those who suffer from mental or physical illnesses."

"Compassion is what makes our nation great. When we invest in the health and happiness of our fellow Americans, we reap dividends that pay off for generations. We urge our leaders to support all those Americans who are seeking to restore and maintain their physical and mental health. We can think of no better way to strengthen our economy, our communities, and our families."

"I hope that no one will ever tell a girl that there is something she can’t do because she is a girl. I hope that women have and embrace the power to change things, so that every person can choose a life that offers them respect from others and deep satisfaction for themselves. I hope that equal education and equal opportunities are available for women to grow to their maximum potential, whatever that is. I hope women will use political power to make the world a better place and claim a natural role as the world’s peacemakers."

"We need to end the silence and put pressure on governments and the private sector to prioritize mental health care reform. And the reform process needs to be guided by informed decision-making that includes the voices and stories of people with lived experience."

"A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be."

"I want people to know that mental illnesses can be diagnosed, can be treated. The overwhelming majority of people can live full and productive lives in the community. People don’t know that. That’s one reason I wrote the book. But I want everybody to know what I know, so we can get over the stigma and go on to do what is good and right for people with mental illnesses."

"Speaking up about this subject can be difficult. But the time has come for people who have lived with mental health disorders to make sure their voices are heard."

"I have already seen the butterfly garden, and I'd like to thank everybody who made that possible. And the movie, and I'm sentimental already. I have known Jimmy Carter for most of my life — I think for all of my life except when I was very small. He likes to say that he was my next-door neighbor when I was born, and he looked through the bars on the cradle and saw me. I didn't recognize him then."

"Thirty years is a long time in the history of caregiving as an issue in our country. The world was a very different place then. We used push-button phones, not cell phones, and had big word processors, not personal computers. There were social clubs, not social media, and people took care of each other because of a sense of familial responsibility. You didn’t hear much about “caregivers,” not because they didn’t exist but because what they were doing was quite common, and it was expected."

"And what will that future hold? Perhaps none have a greater right to ask that question than the young people of this country, and none are more qualified to answer. The ten teenage essay winners who participated in the opening ceremony had been asked: "How will women have changed this country by the year 2087?" Although they came from places as diverse as Dorchester, Alaska and the Bronx, New York, each was chosen because she or he had expressed a unique opinion or insight into the future role of women in our society."

"Recovery is one prevalence. Mental illness affects all of us. They touch every family in our country. One in four Americans is diagnosed with mental illness every year, one in four. This is one reason why I cannot understand why stigma is still so bad because everybody knows somebody, if not a family member, a close friend, living with a mental illness. Stigma is the third thing. Stigma is the greatest barrier to seeking care for individuals who have mental illness, the greatest barrier for a person with a mental illness. And it’s the greatest barrier for those of us in the field who are trying to do something about it."

"Maybe a hundred years from now we can say "We the People" and include all of the people of this great country of ours. If what we heard from each other and from our young people is an example of changing attitudes, we can truly look forward to the future as a golden age for women."

"Be grateful for the highs — and be grateful for the lows — 'cause it's in the lows where you learn."

"It took my family a long time to realize that something was wrong. My brother and I were in complete denial; we loved our mother so much and we didn’t want to admit that her health was deteriorating."

"My goal every day was to free Olympia to do the things that only she could do. These included memorizing her lines, going for a costume fitting and working out with her yoga instructor. I did everything else and I did it for 25 years."

"This is not a humiliating experience. This is not a humiliating experience."

"I don’t know, you get old enough and your hair gets white and somebody notices and they give you a star."

"I feel the audience is very much there, It’s a big thing — to let an audience in, let them affect and move you."

"I really enjoy that sort of exploration in a community of people. That's what I really like. All those people come, and sit together, and then we all go through this experience, and some aspect of our humanity is touched."

"It is hard. And as you get older it's harder. Not to do the work, that's not the frustrating part. What's hard is raising the money, building the board, staying abreast of the current things that are happening that want to sabotage and submerge you."

"You know when you get to my age, it's nice to be intact. Physically surviving is important."

"Because now I am a grandmother, and I love it. It's like a free ride. Your kids are doing all the worrying, and scrambling. Children and grandchildren can make you really happy. You walk in the room and there is like a glow. I often think about how fortunate we are as a family."

"Olympia speak about growing up in 2007."

"I believe that in the theater you really can't do anything that doesn't have some political consequence. My work has been about finding my own voice and a way to express myself."

"Growing up I was always feeling like an outsider, being Greek in communities that were not very ethnic. I felt like an outsider in the Greek community, too, because women were expected to behave and socialize in a certain way, and I didn't. Also being an actor I felt like an outsider, because not many Greek American women were actors then. But once you realize that you are an outsider, there can be a freedom in that. You can find your own way."

"If you are convinced this is what you want to do, don't be afraid, go forward. You have to know what you want and go for it. Don't let the money be an issue. You can always pay your bills if you're willing to work."

"Critics were surprised that I was convincing as the southern Clarey in Steel Magnolias. The bias is still there but not as much."

"I would not forget that the pale-faced missionary and the hoodooed aborigine are both God's creatures, though small indeed their own conceptions of Infinite Love. A wee child toddling in a wonder world, I prefer to their dogma my excursions into the natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and the sweet breathing of flowers. Here, in a fleeting quiet, I am awakened by the fluttering robe of the Great Spirit. To my innermost consciousness the phenomenal universe is a royal' mantle, vibrating with His divine breath. Caught in its flowing fringes are the spangles and oscillating brilliants of sun, moon, and stars."

"Finally resuming the chair at my desk I feel in keen sympathy with my fellow-creatures, for I seem to see clearly again that all are akin. The racial lines, which once were bitterly real, now serve nothing more than marking out a living mosaic of human beings. And even here men of the same color are like the ivory keys of one instrument where each resembles all the rest, yet varies from them in pitch and quality of voice. And those creatures who are for a time mere echoes of another's note are not unlike the fable of the thin sick man whose distorted shadow, dressed like a real creature, came to the old master to make him follow as a shadow. Thus with a compassion for all echoes in human guise, I greet the solemn-faced "native preacher" whom I find awaiting me. I listen with respect for God's creature, though he mouth most strangely the jangling phrases of a bigoted creed."

"our little ones — they are our future hope. Our children!"

"The greatest gift in life is consciousness. Not positions, not the dollar, but that the Almighty Spirit gives us life and we have a rational mind with which to see all the wonders of the universe."

"With the strong, happy sense that both great and small are so surely enfolded in His magnitude that, without a miss, each has his allotted individual ground of opportunities, I am buoyant with good nature."

"Now we are meeting a civilization from a race that came from Europe. We have to meet it each day — there is no dodging, and it is not easy. It is going to take courage; it is going to test your strength. It is going to test your faith in the Greatest of All. It is going to be hard, but let us stand the test, true to the Indian blood. Let us do that. Let us teach our children to be proud of their Indian blood and to stand the test bravely."

"Use the words that come to you, that which is in the heart and mind."

"Though I burned with indignation upon discovering on every side instances no less shame-ful than those I have mentioned, there was no present help. Even the few rare ones who have worked nobly for my race were powerless to choose workmen like themselves. To be sure, a man was sent from the Great Father to inspect Indian schools, but what he saw was usually the students' sample work made for exhibition. I was nettled by this sly cunning of the workmen who hookwinked the Indian's pale Father at Washington."

"At this stage of my own evolution, I was ready to curse men of small capacity for being the dwarfs their God had made them. In the process of my education I had lost all consciousness of the nature world about me. Thus, when a hidden rage took me to the small white-walled prison which I then called my room, I unknowingly turned away from my one salvation. Alone in my room, I sat like the petrified Indian woman of whom my mother used to tell me. I wished my heart's burdens would turn me to unfeeling stone. But alive, in my tomb, I was destitute! For the white man's papers I had given up my faith in the Great Spirit. For these same papers I had forgotten the healing in trees and brooks. On account of my mother's simple view of life, and my lack of any, I gave her up, also. I made no friends among the race of people I loathed. Like a slender tree, I had been uprooted from my mother, nature, and God. I was shorn of my branches, which had waved in sympathy and love for home and friends. The natural coat of bark which had protected my oversenstive nature was scraped off to the very quick."

"My heart and I lie small upon the earth like a grain of throbbing sand."

"Leaving my mother, I returned to the school in the East. As months passed over me, I slowly comprehended that the large army of white teachers in Indian schools had a larger missionary creed than I had suspected. It was one which included self-preservation quite as much as Indian education."

"Within a week I was again actively testing the chains which tightly bound my individuality like a mummy for burial. The melancholy of those black days has left so long a shadow that it darkens the path of years that have since gone by. These sad memories rise above those of smoothly grinding school days. Perhaps my Indian nature is the moaning wind which stirs them now for their present record. But, however tempestuous this is within me, it comes out as the low voice of a curiously colored seashell, which is only for those ears that are bent with compassion to hear it. (V: IRON ROUTINE)"

"It was next to impossible to leave the iron routine after the civilizing machine had once begun its day's buzzing; and as it was inbred in me to suffer in silence rather than to appeal to the ears of one whose open eyes could not see my pain, I have many times trudged in the day's harness heavy-footed, like a dumb sick brute. (V: IRON ROUTINE)"

"After my first three years of school, I roamed again in the Western country through four strange summers. During this time I seemed to hang in the heart of chaos, beyond the touch or voice of human aid. My brother, being almost ten years my senior, did not quite understand my feelings. My mother had never gone inside of a schoolhouse, and so she was not capable of comforting her daughter who could read and write. Even nature seemed to have no place for me. I was neither a wee girl nor a tall one; neither a wild Indian nor a tame one. This deporable situation was the effect of my brief course in the East, and the unsatisfactory "teenth" in a girl's years. (VI: FOUR STRANGE SUMMERS)"

"my mother said to me. “You must learn the white man’s language so when you grow up you will talk for us and for the Indian and the white man will have a better understanding.” I said, “I will.” It has not always been easy, but I said, “I am going to do the best I can and then I am going to let the Great Spirit do the rest.”"

"As I hid myself in my little room in the college dormitory, away from the scornful and yet curious eyes of the students, I pined for sympathy. Often I wept in secret, wishing I had gone West, to be nourished by my mother's love, instead of remaining among a cold race whose hearts were frozen hard with prejudice. (VII. INCURRING MY MOTHER'S DISPLEASURE)"

"If I could tell everyone in this country one thing that I learned it would be this: We need to have an open ear and an open mind. We need to have leaders that are willing to listen, to accept feedback, and adjust. We also need to remember that we still have men and women overseas who are fighting and dying to preserve and protect the principles that we're all supposed to have bought into as Americans. And remember that if you do have respect for a veteran, and the vast majority of people do, that means that you should have respect for yourself and for other Americans. We are all there fighting, black guys, white guys, Hispanic guys. So, if you want to say thank you for your service, then stop the fighting here, stop the discrimination among races and classes. That can start with being an open ear. Listen. As a leader, it isn't about issuing commands. You have to listen, accept feedback, and make changes."