Ten Steps to Nanette Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Nanette is basically Eat Pray Love for autistic queer folk.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 boil it down to its bare essentials, golf is a game of considerable skill, elitism, white supremacy and sexism all wrapped up in a genteel walk, and I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to learn, so early in life, that having a decent level of skill means fuck-all in life if you’re a girl, and especially so if you’re of the fat and poor variety.[”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“I have never identified with how people see me. I have a great big universe of stuff inside of me. None of it is gendered. None of it. I love who I am. It’s only on the other side of my skin where the pain begins. But I will not negotiate anymore. I am proud to be Queer.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“We don't grieve for what we've lost but for what we never knew. We grieve because none of us can reconcile the beauty we can see in our past with the ugliness we were told to remember.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“I did not pull myself out of this hole. I just got lucky. So many people work hard their whole entire lives and only ever go backward, through no fault of their own. People are trapped in cycles far worse than the one I was in, and it's just not their fault. So, I won't be claiming that it was some kind of superior grit of mine that got me through it. All I did was enter a comedy competition and had a bit of luck for once.”
― 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

“Some people, most particularly the guy who came up with the concept, will tell you that 'The Grim Reaper' was a work of genius, a revolutionary approach to television advertising. But I’m here to tell you that was, and remains, a total and utter shit stain of an idea. And you don’t need to go any further than the first line of the ad to understand why:

'At first, it was only gays and drug users being killed by AIDS.'
It is the word 'only' that pisses me off. 'Only gays and IV drug users.' that is to say: 'Only' people who don’t matter. 'Only' people whose suffering should be of no concern to you. Like I said. A total and utter shit stain of an idea. Defenders of the ad might argue that the 'only' was simply about identifying those whom the AIDS epidemic was affecting, and not a statement of this demographic’s value to the community. To which I would say: If you’re such a genius at mass messaging then you should be aware of how the word 'only' would work in the minds of those who are already looking for ways to subjugate the humanity of the people who are listed after the world 'only'.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“Please, stop expecting people with autism to be exceptional. It is a basic human right to have average abilities.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“To actively isolate a fellow human being is nothing short of structural violence.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette