17 Quotes Tagged: body-image

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For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.

I've gone through stages where I hate my body so much that I won't even wear shorts and a bra in my house because if I pass a mirror, that's the end of my day.

As females, most of us have spent a lifetime being inundated with the message that our worth is inextricably linked to our attractiveness. We are trained from our earliest years to turn a critical eye on ourselves: Are we thin enough? Too thin? Tall enough? Too tall? Athletic enough? Too athletic? Curvy enough? Too curvy? And the list goes on. The ideal of attractiveness is mercurial and capricious, ever-shifting and forever-out-of-reach. It is an impossible ideal by its very nature. And it is a lie. To walk through life with calm assurance, clothed in confidence in our femininity and self-worth, requires that we first recognize and reject the lie that our worth is tied to our attractiveness. We must learn to appreciate and accept the endless array of attributes that make each of us a wonderfully and gorgeously unique human. We must discover for ourselves the truth that our worth lies solely in our existence. That to exist is to be worthy of love and acceptance and fulfillment and companionship and tenderness and happiness. When we can see and accept that our existence is what makes us worthy, we will finally be able to accept our own worthiness, to love our female skin in all of its unique glory, and to walk confidently and comfortably in a world desperate for the love that we can now freely give.

"Be patient. Your skin took a while to deteriorate. Give it some time to reflect a calmer inner state. As one of my friends states on his Facebook profile: "The true Losers in Life, are not those who Try and Fail, but those who Fail to Try.

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing — they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

If my self was my dwelling, then my body resembled an orchard that surrounded it. I could either cultivate that orchard to its capacity or leave it for the weeds to run riot in.

There are some truths in this world that one cannot see unless one unbends one's posture.

That’s sad. How plastic and artificial life has become. It gets harder and harder to find something…real.” Nin interlocked his fingers, and stretched out his arms. “Real love, real friends, real body parts…

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Serena’s body isn’t built to emulate the look of the model in an Ann Taylor shift dress. It’s built – through an exacting and grueling regimen – to decimate her opponents. And his suggestion that the body, too, is beautiful and sexy – in spite of, or even because of, its threat to the norms of white femininity – will continue to be threatening until the standards of beauty are decentered from those of the white upper class.