To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.

I'm sometimes asked what it takes to be pretty. For me, feeling pretty is feeling like I accomplished what I wanted to do that day. That's a different thing from fashion or how you wear your makeup or your eyelashes. If you know who you are and keep that in mind at all times, then you won't sacrifice your principles, your values, your true self. You can look in the mirror and feel good about yourself - even feel pretty - inside and out.

For me, feeling pretty is feeling like I accomplished what I wanted to do that day. That's a different thing from fashion or how you wear your makeup or your eyelashes. If you know who you are and keep that in mind at all times, then you won't sacrifice your principles, your values, your true self. You can look in the mirror and feel good about yourself - even feel pretty - inside and out.

a great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain

Trust a girl of sixteen for knowing well if she is pretty; concerning her plainness she may be ignorant.

Pretty and beautiful are two different things. Only a few women are pretty, but even one who's not so hot to look at can be beautiful. A lot of guys make mistakes when they turn down a beautiful woman for one who's just pretty.

Girls aren't beautiful, they're pretty. Beautiful is too heavy a word to assign to a girl. Women are beautiful because their faces show that they know they have lost something and picked up something else.

Someone put a tea-tray on the table beside us, and I looked up to see the very prettiest girl I had ever set eyes on. She seemed little more than a child, and before the war would probably have still ranked as a flapper. She wore the neat blue dress and apron of a VAD, and her white cap was set on hair like spun gold. She smiled demurely as she arranged the tea-things, and I thought I had never seen eyes at once so merry and so grave. I stared after her as she walked across the lawn, and I remember noticing that she moved with the free grace of an athletic boy.

But what made him still more fortunate, as he said himself, was having a daughter of such exceeding beauty, rare intelligence, gracefulness, and virtue, that everyone who knew her and beheld her marvelled at the extraordinary gifts with which heaven and nature had endowed her. As a child she was beautiful, she continued to grow in beauty, and at the age of sixteen she was most lovely. The fame of her beauty began to spread abroad through all the villages around — but why do I say the villages around, merely, when it spread to distant cities, and even made its way into the halls of royalty and reached the ears of people of every class, who came from all sides to see her as if to see something rare and curious, or some wonder-working image?

You are very lovely now and soon you will be beautiful. Ant not in an ordinary way. Youth is always beautiful, but you are like some creatures of fairy born to bring ill to mortals. Only trouble can follow such gifts

Ask any girl what she'd rather be than beautiful, and she'll say more beautiful.

Women, you don't want to try to be pretty, it's a lie. You want to be beautiful, to tell the truth. Pretty is a manipulation. You want to be beautiful. To tell the truth. Truth is beauty.

I wanted to look young in this role, it was a needed thing. She’s 14. This role I really needed to feel 14, I had to be 14 in every way possible, so I hung out with my 14 year-old cousin for a month. She had a retainer and pigtails and all that. There’s something in their eyes, between age 10 and 15 I think, it’s just that sort of ‘anything is possible’ look. For me, the most beautiful thing you could ever see is like a child’s eyes. I wanted to really make sure that I captured her spirit, that youthful spirit. For me it’s all about dreaming. What does she look like when she walks? What’s the look in her eye? It’s not about, ‘Oh, on this move, I’m going to put my arm like that.’ It’s just the whole spirit, so that any way that I would move would be right.

The girls who were unanimously considered beautiful often rested on their beauty alone. I felt I had to do things, to be intelligent and develop a personality in order to be seen as attractive. By the time I realized maybe I wasn't plain and might even possibly be pretty, I had already trained myself to be a little more interesting and informed.