Body Image Quotes

“The reality is that our bodies are dynamic, evolving, and precious just as they are right now! As my oldest, dearest seventy-eight-year-old client, Dot, once said to me, "Wendy, if I realized at fifty how much worse my body would be at seventy, I'd have stopped complaining so much and shown my body off a lot more. And had lots more sex.”
― Wendy Mak, The Capsule Wardrobe: 1,000 Outfits from 30 Pieces

“Treat your body like the altar that it is. Provide it with nourishment, offerings, love, attentive care, worship, etc.”
― Robin S. Baker

“And I prefer the internet because I don't like having a body.”
― Elle Nash, Little Birds

“It seemed impossible that I was supposed to keep loving - even revering - my body as it decomposed in slow motion. Why not give in and have low self-esteem? Maybe I could slay in that way instead.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“Absolutely no good comes from hating your body. You must train yourself to love it.”
― Michelle Thomas, My Sh*t Therapist: & Other Mental Health Stories

“I wanted my body
To be a muse
To an artist
But it somehow became
A topic for body shaming”
― Yashvi Italiya, THE CHAOTIC SILENCE

“I always imagined rage to be a red, chaotic state. But it's quiet and translucent and euphoric. A sister to freedom.”
― Rachel Harrison

“Usually, I avoid mirrors. But today I'm hoping that the sight of my own body will help me place myself in the newly shifted universe.”
― Danya Kukafka, Girl in Snow

“Although self-starvation as manifest in anorexia nervosa is a deadly form of self-destruction, it is also a healthy expression of the desire to be autonomous.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“In families of eating-disordered patients, the narcissistic use of the daughter by the mother is often immediately striking. Throughout the literature the degree of enmeshment or symbiosis between mother and daughter is remarked upon. Daughters are torn between the urgings of their own developmental strivings and their need to meet their mothers' narcissistic needs.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“Trees grow stronger in response to the wind, and their roots grow deeper. This moment in history may feel like it’s planted in the path of a category 5 hurricane. It has ripped us up, but it has also rooted us, weaving us together beneath the surface of the ground and leaving us stronger than ever. We can grieve the loss while, at the same time, falling madly in love with what it has mobilized in us: caring, grace, companionship, openness, and uncensored, outspoken truth-telling. Dying can teach us a great deal about living.”
― Sarah Hays Coomer, Physical Disobedience

“It wasn't a perfect body. It was chafed and scarred and bloody. But it was them. God, it was them.”
― Winter Holmes, Bound in Flesh: An Anthology of Trans Body Horror

“Dear Body
Hi,
I really need to talk to you
What i mean to say is...
I am...
I am...
I am sorry”
― Malebo Sephodi

“When did I become
I and the body? When did the two of us
separate?”
― Aditi Nagrath

“You give yourself something to rebel against every time you lay down an inflexible, moral law...The power of choice is a freedom our minds don’t give up easily.”
― Rebecca Scritchfield, Body Kindness: Transform Your Health from the Inside Out—and Never Say Diet Again

“My new schedule changed everything about how I ate; my focus shifted from wanting to be thin (because for the first I didn't have to be) but simply surviving my schedule. Instead of counting calories, I focused on eating for optimal energy - I didn't really have a game plan; I just tried to eat the foods that made me feel good physically and kept me awake during my long days. Within six months of starting my web series The Daily Special, I had gone from a size twelve back to a size eight, and it had been effortless. I decided right then and there that I had found the secret; the key to being thin was being busy and happy. That was it, I thought. I just had to busy and happy all the time and I would stay thin.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Beautiful Bodies: A Memoir

“My whole world revolved around a constant effort to be better than I was the day before. Self-acceptance was for people who were done working, and I had so much work to do. One day when I had done everything that I needed to do, I would sit back and accept myself; I would love myself then. But now, now I had work to do.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Beautiful Bodies: A Memoir

“But biology hadn't anticipated modern culture. In a world that coveted thigh gaps and bikini bridges, a thirty-three-inch waist might be perfectly healthy for someone with a broad build, but what's considered healthy isn't necessarily what's considered beautiful - which is why perfectly health people spend their lives feeling like crap.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Beautiful Bodies: A Memoir

“There are seven billion bodies in the world, and I got this one. It may not be the best one, but it's far from being the worst. It comes from a long line of people who have survived things much more harrowing than social-media bullying or miscarriages. I've gotten the best they had to offer. It's a strong body and a soft body, while it's not as beautiful as I'd have liked, it's the only one I'll ever had, so I'm working on being thankful for it.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Beautiful Bodies: A Memoir

“We experience the wish for more perfect bodies as our own desire, as indeed it is, yet it is hard to separate out the ways bodies are seen, talked about and written about and the effect of that on our own personal perception of our own bodies and other bodies.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“. . . our visual world is being transformed through an intensification of images which represent the body and parts of the body in ways that artfully convey a sense that are own bodies are seriously in need of reshaping and updating.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“Everyone has the right to own a doll that looks like them.”
― Katy Wix, Delicacy

“I wish I didn’t care about this stuff. I know it’s bad, wrong, against what we’ve been taught. But the problem with thoughts is they come and go as they please.”
― Christina Collins, The Town with No Mirrors

“A good 2,000 to 5,000 times a week, we receive images of bodies enhanced by digital manipulation. These images convey an idea of a body which does not exist in the real world.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“With the body judged externally, dismay will be rife. Success means looking younger every year, as the women in the gym seem to. Success means regulating the body: controlling hungers, desires, ageing and emissions. Success means seeing the body as a lifelong work. Success means anticipating faults - physical, medical, and aesthetic - and correcting them. But when and if the ordinary processes of the body cannot be sufficiently restraint, which of course they can't, the body becomes a source of consternation as well as failure.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“And as she looked into that mirror, other trivial, nonsensical thoughts ravaged her consciousness, making it clear that her youthful innocence had descended into the deep waters of adolescence.”
― H.C. Roberts, Harp and the Lyre: Exposed

“This is a love story, though. The kind where the lover laments all the years she lost at the altar of some false god. When regret seeps in, I try to remember the Hecatoncheires. They did not defeat the Titans as children. They lived under their power. They were of the Titans. It took years for their strength to surpass that of the old gods. But when they did? They threw mountains, a hundred at a time, one for each great hand. And what if they had been taught to hate their own strength? Maybe it would have taken a hundred years for them to grasp a mountain in hand, to understand what they could do, that they could make their own Olympus.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“I look in the mirror and say to myself I look thin like this and then let go of my gut and watch the wobble and say maybe this is why you don't love me any more? I will never know because I will not ask you.”
― Emma Glass, Rest and Be Thankful

“To admit this—a hopelessly unfashionable addiction to the appearance of my body—is a crime in some circles. It's much more becoming to "embrace your flaws" or—even better—to not see your body's flaws at all, to firmly believe that your physical appearance is immaterial and unimportant, that your body is simply a vessel for your soul and your personality. Personally, I've found the undoing of generations of social conditioning to be slow going.”
― Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only

“Eating disordered patients often grow up in families that place an inordinate amount of importance upon bodily appearance, including weight, and focus upon particular parts of the body: protruding tummies, thunder thighs, and tree-trunk legs. We see these same pathogenic qualities in much of the advertising that is directed toward women and girls.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction