#embarrassment

The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate. ↗

— Douglas Engelbart

#directly proportional #embarrassment #mature #person #proportional

I am the daughter of a Chicana and anglo. I think most days I am an embarrassment to both groups. I sometimes hate the white in me so viciously that I long to forget the commitment my skin has imposed upon my life. ↗

— Cherrie Moraga

#anglo #both #commitment #daughter #days

Right now, my daughter's just rolling her eyes at everything I do; I'm just an embarrassment. ↗

— Elizabeth Perkins

#embarrassment #everything #eyes #her #i

I used to be a discipline problem, which caused me embarrassment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honor. ↗

— Ishmael Reed

#caused #discipline #embarrassment #honor #i

They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards. ↗

— Tim O'Brien

#embarrassment #shame #war #courage

It was not their irritating assumption of equality that annoyed Nicholai so much as their cultural confusions. The Americans seemed to confuse standard of living with quality of life, equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity, bravery with courage, machismo with manhood, liberty with freedom, wordiness with articulation, fun with pleasure - in short, all of the misconceptions common to those who assume that justice implies equality for all, rather than equality for equals. ↗

— Trevanian

#youth #courage

My sincere thanks to friends and family, especially my mother, father, brother, and Mandy, who continue to love and support me despite my obsessions. ↗

— Jonathan Ball

#embarrassment #friendship #gross #language-barrier #poetry

Thinking, not for the first time, that life should come with a trapdoor. Just a little exit hatch you could disappear through when you´d utterly and completely mortified yourself. Or when you had spontaneous zit eruptions. “Good book?” he asked, taking it from her and reading the subtitle, “A Guide for Good Girls Who (Sometimes) Want to Be Bad,” out loud. But life did not come with a trapdoor. ↗

— Michele Jaffe

#funny #teen #funny

The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#humanity #isolation #love #love

Seeing him like this, dressed just for her in so patent a manner, she could not hold back the fiery blush that rose to her face. She was embarrassed when she greeted him, and he was more embarrassed by her embarrassment. The knowledge that they were behaving as if they were sweethearts was even more embarrassing, and the knowledge that they were both embarrassed embarrassed them so much that Captain Samaritano noticed it with a tremor of compassion. ↗

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

#love #sweethearts #love