Quotes & Sayings About Body Image

The trouble is that so many people, most of them women, think they have to have a perfect body to be loved. But all it has to do is be capable of loving---and being loved. — Nina George

The scale can only tell you what you weigh; not who you are. — Steve Maraboli

At the heart of racism stands Satan, not man. No one is more pleased by the racial tension in the world than God's ultimate enemy. I'm sure he marvels at how shallow we humans tend to be, by hating one another simply because of skin color! If you are a child of the Most High God and you are fighting in this war of division and hatred (even if only in thought), you are fighting for the enemy.

If this is you, you need to repent of this sin and start seeing others the way God sees them, as made in His image. If not, Satan will keep stirring your mind with thoughts that will not only further stoke the burning hatred of racism deep within you, it will put even more distance between you and the One who saw your unformed body before the foundations of the world, and knit you together in your mother's womb. — Patrick Higgins

The celebrated opening image of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is another case in point:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table ...
How, the reader wonders, can the evening look like an anaesthetised body? Yet the point surely lies as much in the force of this bizarre image as in its meaning. We are in a modern world in which settled correspondences or traditional affinities between things have broken down. In the arbitrary flux of modern experience, the whole idea of representation - of on thing predictably standing for another - has been plunged into crisis; and this strikingly dislocated image, one which more or less ushers in 'modern' poetry with a rebellious flourish, is a symptom of this bleak condition. — Terry Eagleton

In so far as the church nurtures the schizophrenic Christian, the church herself contributes to the very process of dismemberment which it is her specific business to check and counter. For the church's function is properly to reconstitute the concept and the reality of the fill man, faculties, and forces blended and united in the service of God. The church's mission as the continuing vehicle of divine incarnation is precisely that- to build and rebuild the unified Body made and remade in the image of the Father. The mind of man must be won for God. — Harry Blamires

There were times when he confronted his own image as a man confronts an empty valley, and the vision propelled him forward again to experience as despair compels us to extinction. Sometimes he was like a man in flight, but running toward the enemy, desperate to feel upon his vanishing body the blows that would prove his being; desperate to imprint upon his sad conformity the mark of real purpose, desperate perhaps, as Leclerc had hinted, to abdicate his conscience in order to discover God. — John Le Carre

If you picture other people as superior to yourself, you will realize that
mental image. Putting a preacher, a saint, a prophet, an expert or anybody up on a pedestal in your personal view, fundamentally accomplishes nothing but the effect of putting you in a pit. — Thomas Daniel Nehrer

If asked to name the definitive image in Lovecraft, one might likely say its tentacles flailing from the body of a monster. For me it would be probably be puppets, manikins, and clown-like things, even though these are more often a matter of metaphor than a literal presence of a monstrous type. Nevertheless, if Lovecraft's tentacle monsters and my puppets and so on fought each other, I think the monsters would win. — Thomas Ligotti

I'm sorry I don't conform to your standards of feminine perfection, but I'm quite happy the way I am - anyway, I wasn't born to be buxom. — Lindsay Armstrong

For women ... bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of a commercial, idealized feminine image that our real and diverse female bodies can't possibly fit. Without these visual references, each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique. — Gloria Steinem

This camera works like photosynthesis. It is as if you were Xeroxing your own face. The pictures have such physicality: their surface is like fine leather, stained from chemicals. Each one has a body and is more than an image. — Julian Schnabel

It's the fact that your body and your personality are not God. God is you. But you can't say you are God just as the ocean is all the waves, but you can't say one wave is the ocean. And so you manifest God in a way that you don't understand. Man himself is the image of God, but he doesn't see that image in himself. And you need to meditate, and there will come your answer, not looking in the mirror. — Goswami Kriyananda

Transformations
All night he ran, his body air,
But that was in another year.
Lately the answered shape of his laughter,
The shape of his smallest word, is fire.
He who is a fierce young crier
Of poems will be as tranquil as water,
Keeping, in sunset glow, the pure
Image of limitless desire;
Then enter earth and come to be,
Inch by inch, geography. — Stanley Kunitz

Man's conscious state is an awareness of body and breath. His subconscious state, active in sleep, is associated with his mental, and temporary, separation from body and breath. His superconscious state is a freedom from the delusion that "existence" depends on body and breath. God lives without breath; the soul made in his image becomes conscious of itself, for the first time, only during the breathless state. — Paramahansa Yogananda

The body image took a real battering. I had really not taken on board how I would feel dressed in a flimsy dress in front of millions of people. — Lynda Bellingham

American Psychological Association, the girlie-girl culture's emphasis on beauty and play-sexiness can increase girls' vulnerability to the pitfalls that most concern parents: depression, eating disorders, distorted body image, risky sexual behavior. — Peggy Orenstein

It's incredibly difficult to keep a healthy body image in this business. — Courtney Thorne-Smith

What is this drive to be thinner, prettier, better dressed, other? Who exactly is this other and what does she look like beyond the jacket she's wearing or the food she's not eating? What might we be doing, thinking, feeling about if we didn't think about body image, ever? — Caroline Knapp

Beauty discrimination has become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough, but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good. — Naomi Wolf

Food is a wonderful source of pleasure - but it will get you into trouble if it's the only source of pleasure you have in your life. — Linda Bacon

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 ... — Jess C. Scott

And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man's brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else's gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another's eyes. — Meg Rosoff

A 2010 study by Barnaby Dixson and colleagues used an eye-tracking device to detect where a man's gaze first falls when looking at an image of a woman's body. In less than a fifth of a second, almost half the men tested looked at the woman's breasts first, while one in three looked at her waist and one in seven looked at the pubic area or thighs. Just one in sixteen men looked at the woman's face first. — Robert Martin

She was every inch the skeletal goddess that had been promised by the bones of her feet. — Jefferson Smith

The articles were extremely eye-opening. Not just in Teen Vogue but in Seventeen and CosmoGirl as well. They were all about being yourself, staying natural, loving your body as is, and going green! The messages were the exact opposite of Vik and Viv's.
Hmmmmm.
Frankie turned to face the full-length mirror that was up against the yellow wardrobe. She opened her robe and examined her body. Fit, muscular, and exquisitely proportioned, she agreed with the magazines. So what if her skin was mint? Or her limbs were attached with seams? According to the magazines, which were - no offense! - way more in touch with the times than her parents were, she was suppose to love her body just the way it was. And she did! Therefor if the normies read magazines (which obviously they did, because they were in them), then they would love her, too. Natural was in.
Besides she was Daddy's perfect little girl. And who didn't love perfect? — Lisi Harrison

The earliest issue I can remember going through was body image issues. I was a chubby little kid and I got made fun of for it. I dealt with horrible, horrible self esteem issues, and I still struggle with that. I think it's what taught me a lot of empathy and compassion, though, but there are those days where I look in the mirror and I still see twelve year old fat Sara. — Sara Bareilles

We try to place the human body in relation to the image all the time, so it's never a kind of a backdrop, but it's more of ... a much more integrative experience. — Simon McBurney

One should use well a mouth for someone will remember your words and the manner they were spoken. One should pose well in a body for someone will remember your image and how you carried it. One should serve well for someone will recall the kindness and spread it among humanity. — Gloria D. Gonsalves

Everybody sees me as this sullen and insecure little thing. Those are just the sides of me that I feel necessary to show because no one else seems to be showing them. — Fiona Apple

Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it. — Susan Sontag

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. — Stephen Fry

But very often (too often, to my taste) I have been photographed and knew it. Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of "posing". I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image. This transformation is an active one: I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (...). — Roland Barthes

Hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are. Being one place and wanting to be somewhere else ... Wanting life to be different from what it is. That's also called leaving without leaving. Dying before you die. It's as if there is a part of you that so rails against being shattered by love that you shatter yourself first. (p. 44) — Geneen Roth

Why, my goodness, honey. After looking at all those pictures of seraphic and perspirationless babes for so long in the privacy of a foxhole, what is a poor doughfoot going to do when he comes home and discovers that American women are, after all, biological and given, under stress, to shiny noses? — Margaret Mitchell

Only a woman can carry in her body an eternal being which bears the very image of God. Only she is the recipient of the miracle of life. Only a woman can conceive and nurture this life using her own flesh and blood, and then deliver a living soul into the world. God has bestowed upon her alone a genuine miracle - the creation of life, and the fusing of an eternal soul with mortal flesh. This fact alone establishes the glory of motherhood.
Despite the most creative plans of humanist scientists and lawmakers to redefine the sexes, no man will ever conceive and give birth to a child. The fruitful womb is a holy gift given by God to women alone. This is one reason why the office of wife and mother is the highest calling to which a woman can aspire.
This is the reason why nations that fear the Lord esteem and protect mothers. They glory in the distinctions between men and women, and attempt to build cultures in which motherhood is honored and protected. — Douglas W. Phillips

Weight (too much or too little) is a by-product. Weight is what happens when you use food to flatten your life. Even with aching joints, it's not about food. Even with arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure. It's about your desire to flatten your life. It's about the fact that you've given up without saying so. It's about your belief that it's not possible to live any other way
and you're using food to act that out without ever having to admit it. (p. 53) — Geneen Roth

And what more am I? I look for aid to the imagination. [But how mistakenly!] I am not that assemblage of limbs we call the human body; I am not a subtle penetrating air distributed throughout all these members; I am not a wind, a fire, a vapor, a breath or anything at all that I can image. I am supposing all these things to be nothing. Yet I find, while so doing, that I am still assured that I am a something. — Rene Descartes

It is the noble races that have left behind them the concept 'barbarian' wherever they have gone; even their highest culture betrays a consciousness of it and even a pride in it (for example, when Pericles says to the Athenians in his famous funeral oration 'our boldness has gained access to every land and sea, everywhere raising imperishable monuments to its goodness and wickedness). This 'boldness' of noble races, mad, absurd, and sudden in its expression, the incalculability, even incredibility of their undertakings - Pericles specially commends the rhathymia of the Athenians - their indifference to and contempt for security, body, life, comfort, their hair-raising cheerfulness and profound joy in all destruction, in all the voluptuousness of victory and cruelty - all this came together, in the minds of those who suffered from it, in the image of the 'barbarian,' the 'evil enemy,' perhaps as the 'Goths,' the 'Vandals. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Only a few kinds of images force you to shut your eyes: death, suffering, the opening of the body, some aspects of pornography for some people, and for others, giving birth. In this case, the eyes become black holes in which the image is absorbed willingly or unwillingly, these images are swallowed up and hit just where it hurts, without passing though the usual filters. — Orlan

I still think of myself as a house. Ravan tried to fix this problem of self-image, as he called it. To teach me to phrase my communication in terms of a human body. To say: let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together.
But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken. — Catherynne M Valente

Self esteem and a healthy body image for people with disabilities are so often hard-fought. — Stella Young

The misconception of equating ease of life with "passing" must be dismantled in our culture. The work begins by each of us recognizing that cis people are not more valuable or legitimate and that trans people who blend as cis are not more valuable or legitimate. We must recognize, discuss, and dismantle this hierarchy that polices bodies and values certain ones over others. We must recognize that we all have different experiences of oppression and privilege, and I recognize that my ability to blend as cis is one conditional privilege that does not negate the fact that I experience the world as a trans woman (with my own fears, insecurities, and body-image issues) no matter how attractive people may think I am. — Janet Mock

The weight of your body is controlled by the image in your mind. — Bob Proctor

My eye, my brain, are images, parts of my body. How could my brain contain images since it is one image among others? — Gilles Deleuze

My parents never recognized the things that for me were achievements. I was praised for the things that came naturally to me, like my intelligence, but when I really put all my effort into looking nice (trying to), it went unrecognised. No-one ever told me I looked pretty or nice, or that I was a beautiful person (to them) and I needed them to... — Carol Lee

I choose this body just as it is. — Kimber Simpkins

It was the way your sweet, soft hands wiped away my tears, and the way your body just curved into mine when you let me hold you. It all made me feel, for just an instant, that everything really was going to be all right. No one has ever comforted me like that ... except my mom." What the fuck? Did I just say all that out loud? I shook my head furiously from side to side as the room started spinning me like a Tilt-a-Whirl at the county fair back home.
Abby grabbed my shoulders to steady me. I blinked my eyes trying to focus on her blurry, but beautiful image. "Most of all, it's that I want someone like you to want me - just for me, not for Jake Slater the singer of Runaway Train." I smacked my hand hard against my chest. "For what's really inside me. — Katie Ashley

Research from Denis Dutton, Brian Boyd, V.S. Ramachandran, William Hirstein and E.O. Wilson, among many others, is clear on the subject: we are enticed by forms, shapes, rhythms and movements that are useful to our existence. We find Vermeer's "The Girl with the Pearl Earring," beautiful, for example, because her face is symmetrical, a clue to her strong immune system2. As the neuroscientist Eric Kandel suggests in The Age of Insight, we are fascinated by Gustav Klimt's Judith because "at a base level, the aesthetics of the image's luminous gold surface, the soft rendering of the body, and the overall harmonious combination of colors could activate the pleasure circuits, triggering the release of dopamine. If Judith's smooth skin and exposed breast trigger the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin, one might feel sexual excitement. — Anonymous

The American Heart Association reports: There are numerous benefits of daily physical activity: reduces the risk of heart disease by improving blood circulation throughout the body; keeps weight under control; improves blood cholesterol levels; prevents and reduces high blood pressure; prevents bone loss; boosts energy levels; helps manage stress; releases tension; improves the ability to fall asleep quickly and sleep well; improves self-image; counters anxiety and depression and increases enthusiasm and optimism; increases muscle strength; gives greater capacity for other physical activities; provides a way to share an activity with family and friends; establishes good heart-healthy habits in children and counters the conditions — Michael Todd Wilson

Hold still we're going to do your portrait, so that you can begin looking like it right away. — Helene Cixous

Stop making someone else's looks your "#goals". By all means aspire to be a better version of your current self, but don't glorify others when you yourself are glorious. — Miya Yamanouchi

Fear arises through identification with form, whether it be a material possession, a physical body, a social role, a self-image, a thought, or an emotion. It arises through unawareness of the formless inner dimension of consciousness or spirit, which is the essence of who you are. You are trapped in object consciousness, unaware of the dimension of inner space which alone is true freedom. — Eckhart Tolle

My thoughts on body image are simple: if you are being kind to yourself mentally and physically you never have anything to be ashamed for, ever. — Lena Dunham

When a body succeeds in emitting or in reflecting luminous vibrations in a distinct and recognizable order--I thought--what does it do with these vibrations? Put them in its pocket? No, it releases them on the first passer-by. And how will the latter behave in the face of vibrations he can't utilize and which, taken in this way, might even be annoying? Hide his head in a hole? No, he'll thrust it out in that direction until the point most exposed to the optic vibrations becomes sensitized and develops the mechanism for exploiting them in the form of images. In short, I conceived of the eye-encephalon link as a kind of tunnel dug from the outside by the force of what was ready to become image, rather than from within by the intention of picking up any old image. — Italo Calvino

This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse
appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. — Michael Oakeshott

There are probably more of us. If we're all zombies, then
there's got to be more. I say we go up to the cemetery and find out."
"Can we get soda on the way?"
Nothing washes down brains better than a can of Coca Cola and a little shameless product placement. (Hey, the undead do have an image problem.)
"Soda and cemeteries! Soda and cemeteries!" they chanted. "And braaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiins!"
"Hey Bernie, you're getting pretty good at that."
"Okay, you try."
"Braaa - " the zombie belched, " - aiiinsss."
Earl heaved the coroner's body out of the way. They headed off for the cemetery, each trying furiously to perfect their own, unique and personal call for brains like an undead choir, out of tune.
"Braaaaiiiiins!" "Braaiiiiiiiinns!" "Braaaaaaaaaains!" "Bray-uns."
"That was just awful." ...Away into the night. — Daniel Younger

If I can help and influence girls who are going through body-image issues then I think that's amazing. — Kate Upton

The way men are seen in photography, in fashion, and the way that men look at pictures of themselves has changed in recent years. It is a subject that has come into focus: The masculine image, a man's personal style, changing attitudes to the male face and body, — Mario Testino

The image pleases me enough : to slip from the body's tight container and into some luminous womb, gliding there without effort till the distant shapes glow brighter and more familiar, till all your beloveds hover before you, their lit arms held out in welcome. — Mary Karr

Just as it is known
That an image of one's face is seen
Depending on a mirror
But does not really exist as a face,
So the conception of "I" exists
Dependent on mind and body,
But like the image of a face
The "I" does not at all exist as its own reality. — Nagarjuna

However we resolve the issue in our individual homes, the moral challenge is, put simply, to make work visible again: not only the scrubbing and vacuuming, but all the hoeing, stacking, hammering, drilling, bending, and lifting that goes into creating and maintaining a livable habitat. In an ever more economically unequal world, where so many of the affluent devote their lives to ghostly pursuits like stock trading, image making, and opinion polling, real work, in the old-fashioned sense of labor that engages hand as well as eye, that tires the body and directly alters the physical world tends to vanish from sight. The feminists of my generation tried to bring some of it into the light of day, but, like busy professional women fleeing the house in the morning, they left the project unfinished, the debate broken off in mid-sentence, the noble intentions unfulfilled. Sooner or later, someone else will have to finish the job. — Barbara Ehrenreich

I have been fairly misunderstood by those who think only of the heart and thereby leave the mind behind. They both are vital and important aspects of our created humanity...in the image of God".

~R. Alan Woods {2006] — R. Alan Woods

Body image has nothing to do with scale numbers, it's how you feel inside. — Elisabeth Hasselbeck

My man prefers meat over the bone. — Shakira

We all have something about ourselves that we'd change if we could in a perfect world, be it our body image, our financial status, our relationship, whatever. I wanted to talk about how nobody's exempted from the realities of life and all those things. — Keri Hilson

I noticed that no matter where I went in the country, there was this group of questions that got asked. I would track them and keep them in categories. Like body image, school, family, friendship, you name it, the emotional life of a teenage girl. — Elizabeth Berkley

That said, pointing out inaccurate or unrealistic portrayals of women to younger grade school children-ages five to eight-does seem to be effective, when done judiciously:taking to little girls about body image and dieting, for example, can actually introduce them to disordered behavior rather than inoculating them against it. I may be taking a bit of a leap here, but to me all this indicated that if you are creeped out about the characters fromMonster High, it is fine to keep them out of your house. — Peggy Orenstein

His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether escape form her image. — George Orwell

Everyone is always leaving each other, chasing down the next seeming opportunity - home or body. Where does it stop? Does it ever? I want to believe it all leads to something grander than the imagination, grander than the end-stop of the Pacific. Or is that it: You get to the place where you land; you are tired now; you settle. You settle. You build a home and raise a family. There are years of eating and arguing, working and waking. There are years of dying. No one knows what the last image will be. — Bich Minh Nguyen

You know you've got problems when your head is hanging over the toilet, puking up your dinner, and what you're thinking of is your dad. And how he thinks you're not pretty. — Teresa Lo

When you believe without knowing you believe that you are damaged at your core, you also believe that you need to hide that damage for anyone to love you. You walk around ashamed of being yourself. You try hard to make up for the way you look, walk, feel. Decisions are agonizing because if you, the person who makes the decision, is damaged, then how can you trust what you decide? You doubt your own impulses so you become masterful at looking outside yourself for comfort. You become an expert at finding experts and programs, at striving and trying hard and then harder to change yourself, but this process only reaffirms what you already believe about yourself
that your needs and choices cannot be trusted, and left to your own devices you are out of control (p.82-83) — Geneen Roth

There are studies that tell us that stress and lack of self-image, lack of self-esteem, severe dieting, binge dieting and binge eating can also be very damaging to a body and bring on various kinds of abnormalities. — Leonard Nimoy

I personally battled with my own body image for years. I used to tell myself, You can't wear anything sleeveless or strapless. And all of a sudden I was like, What if I just didn't send such negative messages to my brain and said, wear it and enjoy it? And now I'm more comfortable in clothes than ever. — Drew Barrymore

As she uttered the words of the prayer, she glanced up at him as if he were God Himself. He watched her with growing pleasure. In front of him was kneeling the directress, being humiliated by a subordinate; in front of him a naked revolutionary was being humiliated by prayer; in front of him a praying lady was being humiliated by her nakedness.
This threefold image of degradation intoxicated him and something unexpected suddenly happened: his body revoked its passive resistance. Edward was excited!
As the directress said, 'And lead us not into temptation,' he quickly threw off all his clothes. When she said, 'Amen,' he violently lifted her off the floor and dragged her onto the couch. — Milan Kundera

Sometimes the ugliest parts of ourselves are what others love the most. — Susan Renee

I've been on both sides: the victim and the villain. I was the victimised model, and everything from my weight to my fertility was held up for discussion. And then I was the person that could garner some kind of positive outcome, by taking on the role of vice chairman of the British Fashion Council and becoming an activist of body image. — Erin O'Connor

Now they show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you've got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn't your biggest problem. Maybe you should get rid of the body before you do the wash. — Jerry Seinfeld

Then there was the realisation that I didn't actually feel that much better when I was thin(ner). In fact the 'thin' version felt worse because I lived with hunger clawing at my stomach all the time, and in fear that I was going to get fat again. After years of neuroticism I'd finally understood those who loved me would continue to put up with me fat or thin, and those who didn't ignored me. As a middle-aged woman I was pretty much invisible anyway. To pass unnoticed through an image-obsessed society is surprisingly liberating. — Helen Brown

Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight. — Naomi Wolf

I remember everyone asking, 'What did you do to get so thin? You looked great.' I looked emaciated. — Rosario Dawson

Permit me to bypass the entire nature vs. nurture "is gender really built-in?" debate with one simple observation: Men and women are made in the image of God as men or as women. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Gen. 1:27). Now, we know God doesn't have a body, so the uniqueness can't be physical. Gender simply must be at the level of the soul, in the deep and everlasting places within us. God doesn't make generic people; he makes something very distinct - a man or a woman. In other words, there is a masculine heart and a feminine heart, which in their own ways reflect or portray to the world God's heart. — John Eldredge

We've been told prettiness will somehow make us better - and more loved. Do we really want to bear the mark of physical beauty? Or do we just want to be loved? — Kate Wicker

Healthy emotions come in all sizes. Healthy minds come in all sizes. And healthy bodies come in all sizes. — Cheri K. Erdman

Beauty shouldn't be about changing yourself to achieve an ideal or be more socially acceptable. Real beauty, the interesting, truly pleasing kind, is about honoring the beauty within you and without you. It's about knowing that someone else's definition of pretty has no hold over you. — Golda Poretsky

Weight and body oppression is oppressive to everyone. When you live in a society that says that one kind of body is bad and and other is good, those with "good" bodies constantly fear that their bodies will go "bad", and those with "bad" bodies are expected feel shame and do everything they can to have "good" bodies. In the process, we torture our bodies, and do everything from engage in disordered eating to invasive surgery to make ourselves okay. Nobody wins in this kind of struggle. — Golda Poretsky

I used to refer to myself as a 'theoretical anorexic,' just as crazy when it came to body image, but saved by a lack of self-discipline. My daughters do everything better than I do - they're smarter, more beautiful, happier. What if they end up better at anorexia, too? — Ayelet Waldman

We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space - how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our own image! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Ribbons I can see the artwork in my head, a dark background with a girl's naked body, melting from her hips down into ribbons of red. The image fits this song to a T. It's a bout breaking down and finding yourself in sex. I think Naomi started writing it before she'd ever had any. Only virgins are this dirty. — C.M. Stunich

Our bodies were printed as blank pages
to be filled with the ink of our hearts — Michael Biondi

For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought. — Milan Kundera

Our culture is obsessed with perfection, especially when it comes to the way women look. The parameters of acceptability as far as physical appearance go are so limiting that only a handful of women actually fall into this category. And the rest of us are left to either squeeze ourselves into molds that don't fit, hating ourselves all the while, or we just give up entirely. — Yancy Lael

Don't change your body to get respect from society. Instead let's change society to respect our bodies. — Golda Poretsky

Anita Johnston, Ph.D., author of Eating in the Light of the Moon, taught me to look in the mirror with curiosity rather than fear. So I may look at my reflection and think, 'That's interesting. I wonder why my body seems bigger today than it did yesterday. Maybe it's water weight. Maybe it's my outfit. Or maybe my eyes are just playing tricks on me.' I know it's not possible for me to gain a noticeable amount of weight overnight, so I will go no further than that. I move on with my day without skipping a beat - and definitely without missing a meal. — Jenni Schaefer

There's warm skin. A strong body that embraces you. Breaths that escape his gasping mouth. But... we're calling out another's name in our hearts. With our eyes closed, that person's image surfaces in our minds. It was a sweet, gentle, yet cruel night. — Yuuri Eda

Your body is yours. My body is mine. No one's body is up for comment. No matter how small, how large, how curvy, how flat. If you love you, then I love you. — Shonda Rhimes

God made a very obvious choice when he made me voluptuous; why would I go against what he decided for me? My limbs work, so I'm not going to complain about the way my body is shaped. — Drew Barrymore

But I never looked like that!' - How do you know? What is the 'you' you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images. — Roland Barthes

I had to grow to love my body. I did not have a good self-image at first. Finally it occurred to me, I'm either going to love me or hate me. And I chose to love myself. Then everything kind of sprung from there. Things that I thought weren't attractive became sexy. Confidence makes you sexy. — Queen Latifah

In the 20 long, hungry years between my late teens and late 30s I bought in to virtually every new diet and/or exercise regime that hoved into view, particularly at this most vulnerable time for those of us prone to poor body image - a new year. — Arabella Weir

Marius glowered at the long cone-shaped ship with its stupid curving tailfins. His field scan swept out. It was an illusion, produced by a small module on the airlock floor. He smashed a disruptor pulse into the solido projector, and the starship image shivered, shrinking down to a beautiful, naked young girl with blonde hair that hung halfway down her back. 'Oh, Howard,' she moaned sensually, running her hands up her body, 'do that again.' Marius let out an incoherent cry, and shot the projector again. — Peter F. Hamilton