Bodies Quotes

“The bodies in my floor all trusted someone. Now I walk on them to tea.”
― Victoria Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic

“How beautiful would it be if we could just see souls instead of bodies? To see love and compassion instead of curves.”
― Karen Quan, Write like no one is reading 2

“Bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from the outside.”
― Egon Schiele

“Young girls are like helpless children in the hands of amorous men, whatever is said to them is true and whatever manipulation on their bodies seems like love to them, sooner or later, they come back to their senses, but the scars are not dead inasmuch as her spoiler lives.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Scars Of Beauty

“There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“Heavenly bodies are nests of invisible birds.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, The Creator

“Are we our bodies? Is a small person less than a big person, then? If we were our bodies, then when we lost an arm, or a leg, would we be less, would we begin to fade from existence? No. We are the same person.

We are not our bodies; we are our thoughts. As they form, they define who we are, and create the reality of our existence.”
― Terry Goodkind, Blood of the Fold

“He knew how to handle pain. You had to lie down with pain, not draw back away from it. You let yourself sort of move around the outside edge of pain like with cold water until you finally got up your nerve to take yourself in hand. Then you took a deep breath and dove in and let yourself sink down it clear to the bottom. And after you had been down inside pain a while you found that like with cold water it was not nearly as cold as you had thought it was when your muscles were cringing themselves away from the outside edge of it as you moved around it trying to get up your nerve. He knew pain.”
― James Jones, From Here to Eternity

“Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.”
― E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

“We are more than the bodies we inhabit," Fawkes said. "They're little more than clothes, and yet we judge so much by them.”
― Michael J. Sullivan, The Death of Dulgath

“Adrian had always found it amusing that a guy could be drilling Stacia up her ass while she considered herself to be a virgin. Her intent had been to present herself as such when she found "Mr. Right.”
― Jess C Scott, Master & Servant

“The difference between men and women is this--if you catch a woman butt-naked, she tries to cover the private parts with her hands. A man will sit there just like you found him even if he doesn't have much to be proud of.”
― Deb Baker, Murder Passes the Buck

“However, I don’t understand why people insist on pitting the concepts of evolution and creation against each other. Why can’t they see that spiritualism and science are one? That bodies evolve and souls evolve and the universe is a fluid place that marries them both in a wonderful package called a human being. What’s wrong with that idea?”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“These are the ruins
I mapped onto my body so I might always be lost.”
― Traci Brimhall

“Time erodes us all.”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was

“I came to regard my body in a new light. For the first time I apprehended the little mounds on my chest as teats for the suckling of young, and their physical resemblance to udders on cows or the swinging distensions on lactating hounds was suddenly unavoidable. Funny how even women forget what breasts are for.

The cleft between my legs transformed as well. It lost a certain outrageousness, an obscenity, or achieved an obscenity of a different sort. The flaps seemed to open not to a narrow, snug dead end, but to something yawning. The passageway itself became a route to somewhere else, a real place, and not merely to a darkness in my mind. The twist of flesh in front took on a devious aspect, its inclusion overtly ulterior, a tempter, a sweetener for doing the species' heavy lifting, like the lollipops I once got at the dentist.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Women have been programmed to view our bodies only in terms of how they look and feel to others, rather than how they feel to ourselves, and how we wish to use them. We are surrounded by media images portraying women as essentially decorative machines of consumer function, constantly doing battle with rampant decay. (Take your vitamins every day and he might keep you, if you don’t forget to whiten your teeth, cover up your smells, color your grey hair and iron out your wrinkles....) As women, we fight this depersonalization every day, this pressure toward the conversion of one’s own self-image into a media expectation of what might satisfy male demand.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

“In the end, there's only one thing you can believe. Bodies are honest; they don't lie.”
― Megan Chance, The Spiritualist

“How to care for the injured body,

the kind of body that can't hold
the content it is living?”
― Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

“Sometimes, your body can make you angry
or sad;

because it doesn't look how you want it to,
or it doesn't do what you'd like it to;

because it might have limits
that you want to move beyond,

but remember, even on the days
you aren't feeling yourself:

Your body is always a good body
because it carries the good in you.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Woke: A Young Poet's Call to Justice

“The sofa was lumpy enough to have had a body sewed into it; stuffing spilled out of the arms where the victim had tried to escape.”
― Christopher Moore, Coyote Blue

“I love Fresh Market but always feel underdressed

squeezing overpriced limes. Louis Vuitton,

Gucci, Fiorucci, and all the ancient East Coast girls

with their scarecrow limbs and Joker grins.

Their silver fox husbands, rosy from tanning beds,

steady their ladies who shuffle along in Miu Miu’s

(not muumuus) and make me hide behind towers

of handmade soaps and white pistachios. Who

knew I’d still feel like the high school fat girl

some thirty-odd years later? My Birkenstocks

and my propensity for fig newtons? Still, whenever

I’m face to face with a face that is no more real

than a doll’s, I try to love my crinkles, my saggy

chin skin. My body organic, with no preservatives.”
― Denise Duhamel; Maureen Seaton;

“But the people,” Fen says. The bodies, is what she means. “They’ll have to wait until the ship comes.” She looks horrified. “They’ll be…” Shakes her head. “I can make it.”

That may well be true. She is a very strong swimmer. But she still wouldn’t fare any better than the splintered boat.

Besides which, I’m not about to let my seventeen-year-old daughter dive for drowned bodies. “They should be buried, Dad,” she says. “We can’t just leave them out there.”

"We can. It’s only their bodies.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“I support all people on earth
who have bodies like and unlike my body,
skins and moles and old scars,
secret and public hair,
crooked toes. I support
those who have done nothing large,
sifter of lentils, sifter of wisdoms,
speak. If we have killed no one
in the name of anything bad or good,
may light feed our leafiest veins.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East

“If we continue to speak in this sameness, speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other. Again, words will pass through our bodies, above our heads, disappear, make us disappear.”
― Luce Irigaray

“You can travel

to where the Tigris and Euphrates flow together
and admire the inventions of people living
on floating islands of reeds; you can travel

along an archipelago and hike among volcanic
pools steaming with water and sulfuric acid;
but you can’t change the eventual, adamant body.”
― Arthur Sze, Sight Lines

“we with our glass hands
we with our coral shoulders
we with our algae voices
we with our mirroring nests
in eye and hair
we the betrayed”
― Elisabeth Borchers, Fish Magic: Selected Poems

“On earth,

the body changes. Gravity
yanks, the sun sheds its skin,
people age. People, our bodies:
always at a point of departure.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“We are dancing the merengue
And my body rings
With the ringing that wants to be answered.
As though I am a little drunk in the bones.”
― Tracy K. Smith, The Body's Question

“The pirates out selling fakes are finally
Able to draw a crowd. College girls
Show bare skin in good faith. They crouch
Over heaps of bright purses, smiling,
Willing to pay. Their arms
Swing forward as they walk away, balancing
That new weight on naked shoulders.
The pirates smile, too, watching
Pair after pair of thighs carved in shadow
As girl after girl glides into the sun.”
― Tracy K. Smith, The Body's Question