Leper Quotes & Sayings

Trixie seesawed between wishing everyone would leave her alone and wondering why everyone treated her like a leper. — Jodi Picoult

Try flying any plane with a baby if you want a sense of what it must have been like to be a leper in the fourteenth century, but try the shuttle for the ultimate in shunning. All those men in suits, looking at you as if your baby is going to throw up over their speech drafts; all those men in suits who used to look at me with respect when I pulled out my American Express gold card, now barely able to conceal their contempt for me and my portable Wet Ones. — Nora Ephron

Jesus never called the poor 'lazy,' fought for tax cuts for the wealthiest Nazarenes or asked a leper for a copay. — John Fugelsang

Bearing witness from the sides of the room, ten or more lepers shouted at the bizarre scene, "Diable! Diable!" And then chants of some sort, or prayers, followed by more shouts of "Diable!" They were hurling these words at Moreau like stones. — Cole Alpaugh

We all know about Father Damien, the French priest who voluntarily forsook the world and went to the leper island of Molokai to labor among its population of sorrowful exiles who wait there, in slow-consuming misery, for death to come and release them from their troubles; — Mark Twain

The very purpose of designing the Temple of Jerusalem as a series of ever more restrictive ingressions was to maintain the priestly monopoly over who can and cannot come into the presence of God and to what degree. The sick, the lame, the leper, the "demon-possessed," menstruating women, those with bodily discharges, those who had recently given birth - none of these were permitted to enter the Temple and take part in the rituals unless first purified according to the priestly code. With every leper cleansed, every paralytic healed, every demon cast out, Jesus was not only challenging that priestly code, he was invalidating the very purpose of the priesthood. — Reza Aslan

You have beautiful hair ... and she reached out to touch it, her bejeweled fingers gently caressing my head. A tear slipped down my cheek. I knew how the lepers felt when Jesus touched them and made them whole again. — Lynn Austin

And Uzziah the king was a leper unto the day of his death, — Anonymous

The night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves. What a welcome sight a leper must have been! — Joseph Heller

I'll lick a leper's neck before I take a lung-full o' your stench, Brother Row. — Mark Lawrence

If you hated me, if you were covered with sores like a leper, if you ran away with another woman or starved me or beat me - how absurd this sounds - I'd still want you, I'd still love you. I KNOW, my darling. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Being thrown out of this place is significantly better than being thrown out of a leper colony. — Blake Edwards

I'm not alive." She heard fury climbing to the top of his voice. "I'm a leper. Outcast unclean. Lepers are ugly and filthy. And abominable." His words filled her with horror and protest. "How can it be?" she moaned. "You are not - abominable. What world is it that dares treat you so? — Stephen R. Donaldson

God be thanked when the Law so works as to take off the sinner from all confidence in himself! To make the leper confess that he is incurable is going a great way toward compelling him to go to that divine Savior, who alone is able to heal him. This is the whole end of the Law toward men whom God will save. — Charles Spurgeon

Treat him as a friend and save a life - A homeless man is not a leper. — Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Don't talk like you're one of them! You're not... even if you'd like to be. To them you're just a freak, like me. They need you right now, but when they don't, they'll cast you out. Like a leper. See, their morals, their "code"... it's a bad joke, dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these uh, these "civilized people", they'll eat each other. See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve. — Christopher J. Nolan

I am a freak in secondhand velour, a leper who uses L'Oreal Anti-sticky Mega Gel. I am rootless, ripped from all foundations, an orphan raising an orphan and wanting to take away everything there is and replace it with stuff I've made. — Dave Eggers

I make myself a leper with the lepers to gain all to Jesus Christ. — Father Damien

Inside,I closed the door quietly. Tom slept on his back in the straw with arms out wide like Christ crucified. I thanked Saint Barbara for guiding me safely thus far.
"Tom?"
A stirring in the straw, a head looking up, a disgusted gasp. "Unclean! Do they send a leper to infect me now?"
I ran to him,whispering. "Hush.It's me, Tess. — Janet Lee Carey

He was a LEPER, you idiot! Not a leopard. — Christopher Moore

'Sex and The City' was made to correct the myth that if you were single at a certain age, you were a leper. Its four characters are heroes to a lot of women; they run around New York, or Gotham - but they have fancy shoes instead of capes. — Michael Patrick King

When I look down into this fucked out cunt of a whore I feel the whole world beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling, a world used up and polished like a leper's skull. — Henry Miller

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. — Ayn Rand

Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom. — Oscar Wilde

[referencing African girls with no medical care while giving birth and the devastating fistulas they are left with untreated] Instead of receiving treatment, these young girls--often just girls of fifteen or sixteen--typically find their lives effectively over. They are divorced from their husbands and, because they emit a terrible odor from their wastes, are often forced to live in a hut by themselves on the edge of the village. Eventually, they starve to death or die of an infection that progresses along the birth canal. The fistula patient is the modern-day leper," notes Ruth Kennedy, a British nurse-midwife. — Nicholas D. Kristof

I think she's afraid to even hug me now. It's my fault, but I miss it, Andrew. I miss it so much it aches sometimes, you know?'
I do know. I do know, I want to tell him, but I let him talk. And he does, with a gut-wrenching honesty that tears at my heart.
'I want to be held. Is that so wrong? I want to be held, and stroked. I want to know that someone loves me. I want to feel it on my skin.' He looks at the ceiling and exhales, then meets my eyes again. 'But nobody touches me anymore. Not even when I have a fever. Mom just hands me a thermometer now.' He drops his eyes and his ears redden. 'Even when you kiss me, you don't touch me. It's like I'm a leper or something. I can hardly keep my hands off of you, but it's not the same for you, is it? — J.H. Trumble

Compare the scale and magnifcence of Versailles with St James's - the brick-built hovel in which the 18th-century kings of England lived. What was then the most powerful monarchy in the world housed its sovereigns in a converted leper hospital, yet, at the same time, parliament provided the magnificent palaces of Chelsea and Greenwich as hospitals for retired soldiers and sailors. — David Starkey

Later the island was turned into a leper colony, a lunatic asylum, and a naval base. The government had only recently turned the island back into a prison. — Nelson Mandela

I would have walked on the waterBut I wasn't fully insured.And the BMA sent a writ my wayWith the very first leper I cured. — Adrian Mitchell

I took Eugene Sue's Arthur from the reading-room. It's indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking. It would take Christ of art to cure this leper. — Gustave Flaubert

The next "I will" is found in Luke, fifth chapter. We read of a leper who came to Christ, and said: "Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean." The Lord touched him, saying, "I will: be thou clean"; and immediately the leprosy left him. — D.L. Moody

I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn't touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God. — Mother Teresa

In becoming a whole person, the grateful leper was healed inside as well as on the outside. That day nine lepers were healed skin deep, but only one had the faith to be made whole. The tenth leper [was] changed eternally by [his] faith in the Savior and the healing power of his atonement. — Merrill J. Bateman

There I go again. I want. I don't want. If I could love You, I could love Henry. God was made man. He was Henry with his astigmatism, Richard with his spots, not only Maurice. If I could love a leper's sores, couldn't I love the boringness of Henry? But I'd turn from the leper if he were here, I suppose, as I shut myself away from Henry. I want the dramatic always. I imagine I'm ready for the pain of your nails ... Dear God, I'm no use. I'm still the same bitch and fake. Clear me out of the way. — Graham Greene

Your face makes a leper's backside look handsome. — Eva Madden

I see God in every human being. When I wash the leper's wounds I feel I am nursing the Lord himself. Is it not a beautiful experience? — Mother Teresa

Truth is a leper banished from the hearts of men and rotting away in exile. All that is left is corruption, a bad smell, some unnameable pieces of what was once a thing lucent and good. — Rikki Ducornet

If what makes you happy is going out and living it up and spending all your money on wine, women, and song, the world doesn't need that. But on the other hand, if you give your life to good works - you go and work in a leper colony and it doesn't make you happy - the chances are you're not doing it very well. — Frederick Buechner

Everyone actually stepped aside when she came down the hall. Like she was a rock star. Or a leper. — Kami Garcia

She bid me to look out on the lawn at the leper girls who were running on lame feet, playing croquet with crippled hands.
"There is beauty," she said, "in the least beautiful of things. — Alan Brennert

All of our prayers are to include thanksgiving. Like the leper, we must pause, turn back, and give thanks. We are so indebted to God that we can never exhaust our opportunities for expressing gratitude. Forgetting — R.C. Sproul

Once leprosy had gone, and the figure of the leper was no more than a distant memory, these structures still remained. The game of exclusion would be played again, often in these same places, in an oddly similar fashion two or three centuries later. The role of the leper was to be played by the poor and by the vagrant, by prisoners and by the 'alienated', and the sort of salvation at stake for both parties in this game of exclusion is the matter of this study. — Michel Foucault

The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach. — Aleister Crowley

We are taught from the very first moment to discover Christ under the distressing disguixe of the poor, the sick, the outcasts. Christ presents Himself to us under every disguise: the dying, the paralytic, the leper, the invalid, the orphan. — Mother Teresa

This landscape of abomination is in a state of flux. Gilles now sees that the trunks are covered in frightful tumours and goitres. He observes exostosis and ulcers, pustulent sores the size of rocks, tubercular chancres, atrocious caries. It is a vegetal leper house, an aboreal venereal clinic in which, at a turn in the path, there stands a copper beech.
And as he stands beneath those crimson leaves, he feels that he is being drenched in a shower of blood; and imagining that a wood nymph lives under the bark, he becomes enraged; he wants to fumble in the flesh of a goddess, massacre the Dryad, violate her in a place unknown to the follies of men. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

The middle classes did not go to public hospitals; those places were reserved for workers, child-mothers, and those unfortunates who had wasted their inheritance, 'squandered the lot', and thus deserved the worst punishments, those, in short, who had gone to rack and ruin. Families would warn their wastrel offspring, their prodigal sons, that 'You'll end up in hospital!', that is, poor, alone and ashamed . Seeing the forbidding exteriors of these institutions, their gloomy corridors, the miserable huddles of mourners that sometimes emerged, used to make me think vaguely of leper colonies. — Gabriel Chevallier

As Emile Leger said when he left his mansion in Montreal to go live in a leper colony in Africa, The time for talking is over. — Brennan Manning

You've helped me for years." His brows pull hard. "Now it's time I help you, and I'm not acting like you're a leper because this guy tells me to. You may be fucking weird as hell when you and Rose start verbally sparring, but you're my weirdo best friend. That's not changing. — Krista Ritchie

And then there was that stupid social networking system, how it had just seemed like the most convenient vessel for the average narcissist. How I'd despised those who couldn't eat a meal without prodding through their glowing portable Internet devices, searching for some tasty piece of gossip, or perhaps just something to complain about.
But that social network had become an overnight epidemic - I'd watched as the daily ways in which we'd lived our lives became molded to fit this shallow instrument. It was a vast change - whether it was social evolution or de- evolution, I wasn't quite sure; but before I knew it, by society's standards, it was I that had become the social leper. — Noah Fregger

And in a land accustomed to so much anguish, Chase tried to be careful with words. His soccer moms began assigning
nicknames during the first day of official practice: Difom, Kakas, Kochma, and Maldyok, which roughly translated to Deformed, Carcass, Nightmare, and Bad Eye.
He made a new rule regarding nicknames. — Cole Alpaugh

Just now when I said, "I have a crush on you," you didn't say, "no way loser". I'd rather have a lobotomy by a leper. That means something — Robin Williams

Lysley Tenorio is a writer of sly wit and lively invention - these are stories bursting with wonders (from monster movies and leper colonies, to faith-healers and superheroes) - but most wondrous of all is his intimate sense of character. Each story is a confession of love betrayed, told with a mournful, austere tenderness as heartbreaking as it is breathtaking. — Peter Ho Davies

change. Eddie saw the leper, the mummy, the bird; he saw the werewolf, and a vampire whose teeth were Gillette Blue-Blades set at crazy angles like mirrors — Stephen King

As one of the first editors at 'Outside' magazine in 1975, it was my contention that most American writing going back to James Fennimore Cooper and then through Twain up to Hemingway had been outdoor writing. At that time, adventure writing meant stuff like 'Saga' or 'Argosy.' 'Death Race with the Jungle Leper Army!' That kind of thing. — Tim Cahill

What a fool she was ever to have imagined that there might be some place in the world where she could sink to the earth with the knowledge that there were people round her who understood, who perhaps even admired and loved her! She was fated to carry loneliness about with her as a leper carries his scabs. 'No one can do anything for me: no one can do anything against me. — Francois Mauriac

The triggering event and resulting shame is worse than being rejected because rejection assumes a path by which to return to acceptability. The fear involved in shame is of permanent abandonment, or exile. Those who see our reprehensible core will be so disgusted and sickened that we will be a leper and an outcast forever. — Dan B. Allender

In their quest to be inclusive and tolerant and up-to-date, the accommodationists imitated his scandalously comprehensive love, while ignoring his scandalously comprehensive judgments. They used his friendship with prostitutes as an excuse to ignore his explicit condemnations of fornication and divorce. They turned his disdain for the religious authorities of his day and his fondness for tax collectors and Roman soldiers into a thin excuse for privileging the secular realm over the sacred. While recognizing his willingness to dine with outcasts and converse with nonbelievers, they deemphasized the crucial fact that he had done so in order to heal them and convert them - ridding the leper of his sickness, telling the Samaritans that soon they would worship in spirit and truth, urging the woman taken in adultery to go, and from now on sin no more. — Ross Douthat

Doctor Nolan had said, quite bluntly, that a lot of people would treat me gingerly, or even avoid me, like a leper with a warning bell. My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me. — Sylvia Plath

I was often looked at as a leper by kids at school because I was a Jehovah's Witness. They didn't like it - you were 'weird'. And on Saturday mornings, you'd be knocking at their doors. I remember standing there with my mum and dad, thinking, 'Oh my God, I know whose door this is, and I'll have to see them on Monday.' It was terrible. — Luke Evans

Choosing sides, the captain of the Red Team says, "We'll give you our best -pitcher. ... "
And we'll take the kid who picks his nose and eats it. And we'll take the kid who smells like piss. We'll take the leper and the left-handed Satanist and the HIV-infected hemophiliac and the hermaphrodite and the pedophile. We'll take drug addiction and we'll take JPEGs of the world instead of the world, MP3s instead of music, and we'll trade real life for sitting at a keyboard. We'll spot you happiness and we'll spot you humanity, and we'll sacrifice mercy just so long as you keep Cannibal at bay. — Chuck Palahniuk

His name's Nash."
Aunt Val took a butter knife from the silverware drawer. "What year is he?"
I groaned inwardly. "Senior." ... here we go ...
Her smile was a little too enthusiastic. "Well that's wonderful!"
Of course, what she really meant was "Rise from the shadows, social leper, and walk in the bright light of acceptance! — Rachel Vincent

The terrible error in the course of human civilization is undoubtedly the defective judgment that allowed religious authorities usurp the foundation of societal morality, in which all collective ethics of humankind must take a cause. This appalling blunder is comparable only to assigning the leper exclusive franchise to run beauty clinics in the society; this can only lead to cycles upon cycles of common infection syndrome. — Adebowale Ojowuro

SMILE - IT NO BROKE YOUR FACE!
-on a stone in Kalaupapa — Alan Brennert

I got so many hickeys, people will think I'm a leper." -Rizzo — Ron De Christoforo

Thumb and forefinger, grimacing at its matted feel. One of those low cellar windows was directly behind it, one pane broken, the other opaque with dirt. He leaned forward, now feeling almost hypnotized. He leaned closer to the window, closer to the cellar-darkness, breathing in that smell of age and must and dry-rot, closer and closer to the black, and surely the leper would have caught him if his asthma hadn't picked that exact moment to kick up. It cramped his lungs with a weight that was painless yet frightening; his breath at once took on the familiar hateful whistling sound. — Stephen King

The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is. — Umberto Eco

I wanted to be a district attorney and solve hidden problems or maybe even be a leper-colony missionary and save people. — Diane Ladd

But only a leper shows its sins to the world. — Alan Rawlings

In Breeze's business one got used to running across the skeletons in people's closets. If Billy's skeleton wore women's underwear, it didn't really matter. Homosexuality on Billy Winston was like acne on a leper. — Christopher Moore

Everyone contributed to this legend except Phineas. At the outset, with the attempt on Hitler's life, Finny had said, "If someone gave Leper a loaded gun and put it at Hitler's temple, he'd miss." There was a general shout of outrage, and then we recommended the building of Leper's triumphal arch around Brinker's keystone. Phineas took no part in it, and since little else was talked about in the Butt Room he soon stopped going there and stopped me from going as well - "How do you expect to be an athlete if you smoke like a forest fire?" He drew me increasingly away from the Butt Room crowd, away from Brinker and Chet and all other friends, into a world inhabited by just himself and me, where there was no war at all, just Phineas and me alone among all the people of the world, training for the Olympics of 1944. — John Knowles

In Hollywood if you are not working, you are a leper. True, you are probably living in the most expensive leper colony in the world. — Allan Sherman

It lies like a leper in purple, it sits like a dead thing smeared with gold. — Oscar Wilde

Don't talk like one of them. You're not! Even if you'd like to be. To them, you're just a freak, like me! They need you right now, but when they don't, they'll cast you out, like a leper! You see, their morals, their code, it's a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these ... these civilized people, they'll eat each other. See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve. -The Joker — Christopher Nolan

From the moment I bought my ticket, I had a premonition I wasn't returning to New York anytime soon.
You Know, this happens a lot to Russians. The Soviet Union is gone, and the borders are as free and passable as they've ever been. And yet, when a Russian moves between the two universes, this feeling of finality persists, the logical impossibility of a place like Russia existing alongside the civilized world, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, sharing the same atmosphere with, say, Vladivostok. It was like those mathematical concepts I could never understand in high school: if, then. If Russia exists, then the West is a mirage; conversely, if Russia does not exist, then and only then is the West real and tangible. No wonder young people talk about "going beyond the cordon" when they talk of emigrating, as if Russia were ringed by a vast cordon sanitaire. Either you stay in the leper colony or you get out into the wider world and maybe try to spread your disease to others. — Gary Shteyngart

I hated school ... I freaking hated it. The fact is that it revolved around something you didn't have access to. If you weren't on the football team, if you were in the band, you were a leper. When people say those were the best years of our lives, I want to scream. — Trent Reznor

America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still. — Henry Miller

If philosophy is mountain climbing
then literature is an anti-gravity parade
I love thee like a leper colony
loves to make a trade — Carl-John X. Veraja

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. — Graham Greene

Lepers were a common sight all over India and in every part of Calcutta, but extending help beyond dropping a coin or two into their rag-wrapped stumps was not. As a child I was convinced even touching a spot a leper had rubbed against would lead to infection. — Bharati Mukherjee

I grew up then, into this life of jazz, and fell immediately into the state of almost audible confusion. Life stood over me like an immoral schoolmistress, editing my thoughts. It seemed to me that there was no ultimate goal for man. Man was beginning a grotesque and bewildered fight with nature, that by the divine and magnificent accident has brought us to where we could fly in her face. We produce a Christ who can raise up the leper and presently, it's the salt of the Earth. If any one can find lesson in that, let him stand forth. Am I crazy trying to pierce the darkness of political idealism with some wild, despairing urge towards truth? Trying to separate the knowable from the unknowable? — F Scott Fitzgerald

But what had lasting significance were not the miracles themselves but Jesus' love. Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, and a few years later, Lazarus died again. Jesus healed the sick, but eventually caught some other disease. He fed the ten thousands, and the next day they were hungry again. But we remember his love. It wasn't that Jesus healed a leper but that he touched a leper, because no one touched lepers. — Shane Claiborne

The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable. The great solitaries were happy in the old days, knew nothing of duplicity, had nothing to hide: they conversed only with their own solitude. — Emil Cioran

The sinner is in a plight more miserable than the leper; let him imitate his example and go to Jesus, "beseeching him and kneeling down to him." Let him exercise what little faith he has, even though it should go no further than "Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean"; and there need be no doubt as to the result of the application. Jesus heals all who come, and casts out none. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I am haunted by interrupted acts,
introspective as a leper, enchanted
by a repulsive clew,
a gross and fugitive movement of the limbs.
Is this the love that shook the lights to flame? — Muriel Rukeyser

Serbia has become a pariah nation, untouchable like a leper. — Ivica Dacic

Man was the outlaw, the rebel, the distorted shape that scarred the earth, the voice that silenced the music of Eden, the hand that raised up obscenities and blasphemies. Man was the pariah-dog, the moral leper in this translucent mirror of Heaven. He was the muddier of crystal waters, the despoiler of forests, the murderer of the innocent, the challenger against God. He was the assassin of the saints and the prophets, for they spoke of what he WOULD NOT HEAR, in the darkness of his spirit! — Taylor Caldwell

Pacing back and forth now on the spur of his conflicting needs, Covenant growled, "Baradakas said just about the same thing. By hell! You people terrify me. When I try to be responsible, you pressure me
and when I collapse you
You're not asking the right questions. You don't have the vaguest notion of what a leper is, and it doesn't even occur to you to inquire. _That's_ why Foul chose me for this. Because I can't
Damnation! Why don't you ask me about where I come from? I've got to tell you. The world I come from doesn't allow anyone to live except on its own terms. Those terms
those terms contradict yours."
"What are its terms?" the High Lord asked carefully.
"That your world is a dream." — Stephen R. Donaldson

Dealing with the media is more difficult that bathing a leper — Mother Teresa

Having George W. Bush giving a lecture on business ethics is like having a leper give you a facial, it just doesn't work! — Robin Williams