Hannah Gadsby > Quotes

“Do you know why we have the sunflowers? It’s not because Vincent van Gogh suffered. It’s because Vincent van Gogh had a brother who loved him. Through all the pain, he had a tether, a connection to the world. And that is the focus of the story we need – connection.”
― Hannah Gadsby

“To be rendered powerless does not destroy your humanity. Your resilience is your humanity. The only people who lose their humanity are those who believe they have the right to render another human being powerless. They are the weak. To yield and not break, that is incredible strength.”
― Hannah Gadsby

“Ironically, I believe Picasso was right. I believe we could paint a better world if we learned to see it from all perspectives, as many perspectives as we possibly could. Because diversity is strength. Difference is a teacher. Fear difference, you learn nothing.

Picasso’s mistake was his arrogance. He assumed he could represent all of the perspectives. And our mistake was to invalidate the perspective of a 17-year-old girl because we believed her potential would never equal his.

Hindsight is a gift. Stop wasting my time.

A 17-year-old girl is just never, ever, ever in her prime! Ever. I am in my prime. Would you test your strength out on me?

There is no way anyone would dare test their strength out on me because you all know there is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.”
― Hannah Gadsby

“I don’t identify as transgender. But I’m clearly gender not-normal. I don’t think even lesbian is the right identity for me. I really don’t. I might as well come out now. I identify as tired. I’m just tired.”
― Hannah Gadsby

“There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.”
― Hannah Gadsby

“So, I will just share it here, because I truly believe that the only universal “body” is our breath, because breath is the only thing that all human bodies experience and as such, it is something we all must share, not just with each other, but, in one way or another, with all living things on earth. To this day, I still can’t think of a better way of truly breaking us free from the visual rut that the canon of Western art has left us languishing in, than the breath of an Indigenous Australian woman.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“What good is a coherent narrative if people don’t want to hear it? Because trauma won’t leave you alone until you feel safe, and safety is not something that an individual can summon on their own. Safety is not a gun. Safety is being able to trust that those around you WANT to protect you from harm. But if those around you don’t believe you are “like them,” then they will focus on the discomfort you make them feel, and that discomfort is not a safe space.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“Coping takes a fuck-ton more effort and energy than thriving ever will.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“I want the world to stop demanding gratuitous details in exchange for empathy. Entertainment in exchange for understanding. But I am not in charge of the world. I am not even in charge of my own story, because, as I am so fond of saying, there is no such thing as a straight line through trauma.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“You learn from the part of the story you focus on.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“The myths around ASD and ADHD have wasted enough of my life, so I don't really want to waste any more of my time thinking about them, much less writing them down. These diagnoses have given me a pathway to understanding myself and for the first time in my life, I am able to like who I am.

If that's not enough for you, if you want me to convince you that I am autistic or prove that ADHD exists, then you can just go fuck yourself.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“Self-hatred is only ever a seed planted from outside in.”
― Hannah Gadsby

“Many people who struggle to find stable employment also contend with things like intergenerational poverty and/or trauma, cycles of abuse, mental illness, systemic discrimination, disability or neurological disorders. Not only are these all chronically stressful and traumatic circumstances, they have all been linked to a high incidence of impaired executive function. Welfare systems are not built to be easy for people who are anxious about using the phone, or people who mix up dates. They are not designed for people who are bad at keeping time, filling out forms, or people who can’t easily access all the relevant bank, residential and employment details from the past five years, if they thought to keep that information at all. Welfare systems don’t accommodate for transience because welfare systems are not built to be accessible, they are built to be temples of administrative doom, because, apparently, welfare is a treasure that must be protected.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“Closed minds are a disorder of the highest order.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“When I told Mum that I was autistic, she said: "Yeah, that makes sense. I always knew that there was a lot going on inside you, but I just couldn't get in. You were like a tin of baked beans and my tin opener wouldn't work on you." It's a tidy metaphor, especially if you know that Mum does not like baked beans.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“You may or may not be ready to hear this information, but I'll tell you, because knowledge is power, ignorance is a cage and feelings can be dealt with.”
― Hannah Gadsby

“lot of noises all at once, even if they are exclusively pleasant sounds, will always feel like an assault. So, the relentless cacophony of high school was constantly and unbearably overwhelming. And don’t get me started on the smell of it. Body sprays competed with hair sprays, which competed with the always over-deployed deodorants that still somehow managed to lose the war against the toxic bouquet of teenage body odour. Thank god I was a smoker; I might’ve perished otherwise. The other hurdle high school threw up at me was homework. I am not morally opposed to extracurricular curricula; I just didn’t have time for it. As in primary school, I needed my evenings to catch up on the things my brain had been unable to take on board during the day, not to mention recover from the sheer exhaustion of trying to subtly navigate a sea of hypercritical teens for hours on end. On top of that, the closer I got to being an adult and the further away from being a baby, the more chores I was expected to get done at home. These extra burdens, as reasonable as they were, led to my brain shutting down more and more, and, without my brain, learning became impossible.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“Nanette is basically Eat Pray Love for autistic queer folk.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“I should also point out that "Nanette" is not completely devoid of jokes. The first half is crammed full of very solid punchlines. And every time I performed the show I filled the room with a lot of big laughter without fail. That is important, not just as a bragging point but because that is how I built the trust. And I needed my audience to trust me because I needed my audience to feel safe. And I needed my audience to feel safe so that I could take that safety away and not give it back. Why? Because that is the shape of trauma.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“I wish I were deadpan. It's a very effective comic device. It's like the better-natured and kinder-hearted cousin of sarcasm.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“Fat jokes were my bread and butter which is a shame because that kind of bread and butter is basically a shame sandwich, and shame is never part of a healthy balanced diet.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“A start is not the same as a beginning.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“The first time I took Valium was the first time that I experienced being unbothered by my own body. The thing is, until the calm of that little pill spread its lovely little tentacles all through me, I had absolutely no idea how uneasy in my own skin I'd always felt. I am not just talking about pain, either. It's more of an extreme and ever-present awareness of my body, as if I don't quite fit myself properly, as if my flesh is a pair of underpants that is forever sliding up the butt crack of my soul.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“To have another person reveal your secret to the world is humiliating enough, but it's so, so much worse when it happens before you've worked it out for yourself and then to hear everyone laugh.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“Fauvism is what you get if you take Post-Impressionism and put it on Expressionist steroids through a technicolour lens. And that sentence is what you get when you've dabbled in enough wank to get by but not enough to participate elegantly.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“The lives of a vulnerable minority should never have been put into the hands of the majority in a media landscape that is all too happy to be powered by the fumes of a toxic debate.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“a lot of noises all at once, even if they are exclusively pleasant sounds, will always feel like an assault. So, the relentless cacophony of high school was constantly and unbearably overwhelming. And don’t get me started on the smell of it. Body sprays competed with hair sprays, which competed with the always over-deployed deodorants that still somehow managed to lose the war against the toxic bouquet of teenage body odour. Thank god I was a smoker; I might’ve perished otherwise. The other hurdle high school threw up at me was homework. I am not morally opposed to extracurricular curricula; I just didn’t have time for it. As in primary school, I needed my evenings to catch up on the things my brain had been unable to take on board during the day, not to mention recover from the sheer exhaustion of trying to subtly navigate a sea of hypercritical teens for hours on end. On top of that, the closer I got to being an adult and the further away from being a baby, the more chores I was expected to get done at home. These extra burdens, as reasonable as they were, led to my brain shutting down more and more, and, without my brain, learning became impossible.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“To be able to wrap your own voice around your own mind, and to be able to craft it into something that has the capacity to make a room full of strangers think and feel differently, even if it's just for a moment in time, is an incredible and humbling thing to be able to do.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“I got through it. Of course I did. Hello. But I didn’t emerge from the experience as a person who was wholly committed to the living of life.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“The power of a joke is not in the writing. It is how you wrap your voice around it.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette