Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again
Attributed toRosa Parks1913–2005 · American civil rights activist
≈Attribution status: Credited to Parks everywhere, sourced nowhere: no publication carrying this wording has ever been named.?Reuse status: Rights unconfirmed
This is one of the most-shared sentences attributed to Rosa Parks, and there is nothing behind it. It is not in Wikiquote’s sourced list, where every other Parks quotation names a book, speech or interview; it sits instead on the talk page under “Unsourced.” A full-text search of her papers at the Library of Congress returns nothing, and Quote Investigator has never written it up. That does not make it a fake — it makes it undocumented, which is a different and more honest thing to say.
“Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again” attributed to Rosa Parks (1913–2005); no primary source identified. Traced by Quotle.info.
Can you use it?
? We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.
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In context
Evoking the world of Rosa Parks — American civil rights activist · Montgomery, Alabama. Theme: "Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
Where the quote actually comes from
Attributed to
Rosa Parks
Primary source
None located — no book, speech, interview or letter carrying this wording
Wikiquote status
Listed under “Unsourced” on the talk page, not in the sourced section
Library of Congress
No match in the full text of the Rosa Parks Papers
Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again.
There is no fuller passage to quote. The sentence travels alone, without a surrounding paragraph, in every source that carries it.
Wikiquote does not treat this as a sourced Parks quote. It appears on the article’s talk page ↗ in a list headed simply “Unsourced” — the holding pen for lines editors could not tie to any publication.
It is missing from the list where it would belong. The Rosa Parks page ↗ carries about a dozen quotations that each name a source — her autobiography, a 1992 NPR interview, a 1995 speech in Washington. This line is not among them.
The Library of Congress holds her papers, and they do not contain it. A full-text search of the Rosa Parks Papers ↗ for “pull the scar off” returns nothing. That is a signal, not a verdict: the digitised collection is a portion of the whole and handwriting OCR is imperfect. The control phrase “tired of giving in” does return a hit, so the search reaches document text.
Her own book is the obvious place to look, and we could not look inside it. The Internet Archive’s copy of Rosa Parks: My Story ↗ is lending-restricted, so its text could not be searched from here. We are not claiming the line is absent from it — only that nobody who quotes the line cites it.
The work in which this wording first appeared has not been identified, so no rights status can honestly be asserted — and nothing here is public domain. Parks died in 2005; her books, speeches and recorded interviews are modern works still in copyright, controlled by her estate and publishers. If these words are hers, they belong to whichever of those they came from.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Context
Why this one is worth checking
The sentence is a good deal more literary than the way Rosa Parks usually talked. Her documented register is flat, exact and unsentimental — “the only tired I was, was tired of giving in” — while this line reaches for an extended metaphor about a wound reopened. That is an observation about style, not evidence, and it cuts both ways: people do not speak in one register their whole lives.
What makes it worth flagging is the shape of its paper trail. A genuine Parks line usually arrives with a book and a page number attached. This one arrives with nothing, and has for as long as anyone has been indexing it.
Undocumented is not the same as fake — and it is not the same as verified either.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1913–2005 · American civil rights activist · Montgomery, Alabama
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was a seamstress and long-serving NAACP secretary in Montgomery, Alabama, whose refusal to give up her bus seat on 1 December 1955 set off the Montgomery bus boycott. Congress later called her the Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement, a title that has had the odd side effect of attracting inspirational sentences she never demonstrably wrote. She published an autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story, with James Haskins in 1992, and her papers are held at the Library of Congress.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Best available source
No primary source located. Listed among unsourced quotations on the talk page of the English Wikiquote article "Rosa Parks" (accessed 19 September 2026); absent from that article's sourced section and from a full-text search of the Rosa Parks Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again’?” Last verified 19 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/have-you-ever-been-hurt-and-the-place-tries-to-heal-a-bit/