The self... is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.

Choose your self-presentations carefully, for what starts out as a mask may become your face.

The normal and the stigmatized are not persons, but perspectives.

All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify

Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.

Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way.

Society is an insane asylum ran by the inmates.

Any group of persons – prisoners, primitives, pilots, or patients – develop a life of their own that becomes meaningful, reasonable and normal once you get close to it.

Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.

There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shriveling up the reality in which one is lodged.

So I ask that these papers be taken for what they merely are: exercises, trials, tryouts, a means of displaying possibilities, not establishing fact.

My parents were dismayed by my love of horror movies as a young girl, then even more dismayed when I kept rooting for Dracula to win instead of Van Helsing.

The stage is a supplement to the pulpit, where virtue, according to Plato's sublime idea, moves our love and affection when made visible to the eye.

The interesting thing about doing a play is to find a way to make it fresh and do it as though you were doing it for the first time.

"On my honor" - what an ennobling phrase! Three short words, nine letters, but the summation of all we call character. From the Boy Scout's Oath.

I think you either have to have a very strong decisive person at the top or else a really brilliant staff command.

Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.

I like Sultana cookies - they are so, so, so good. I think the best in the world.

The way you begin each day defines how you'll live each day.

It was like drowning, only from the inside out.

Dummy, dummy, go out now and fill your tummy.