“I am not wearing makeup because I decided my monolid is beautiful and despite what Disney cartoons have led you to believe, you don’t need long eyelashes to be a woman.”— Carolyn A. García, afropunk.com
“When you raise women to believe that we are insignificant, that we are broken, that we are sick, that the only cure is starvation and restraint and smallness; when you pit women against one another, keep us shackled by shame and hunger, obsessing over our flaws, rather than our power and potential;…”— Lindy West, theguardian.com
“The ‘perfect body’ is a lie. I believed in it for a long time, and I let it shape my life, and shrink it – my real life, populated by my real body. Don’t let fiction tell you what to do. In the omnidirectional orgy gardens of Vlaxnoid, no one cares about your arm flab.”— Lindy West, theguardian.com
“I used to want a super flat stomach but then I realized it would have zero impact on my day to day life, so now I just want more money.”— Allison Raskin, twitter.com
“Bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from the outside.”— Egon Schiele, amazon.com
“One thing we can all agree on, though? Aging is harder for women. We bear the brunt of the equation of beauty with youth and youth with power — the double-whammy of ageism and sexism. How do we cope? We splurge on anti-aging products. We fudge or lie about our age. We diet, we exercise, we get plump…”— Ashton Applewhite, nytimes.com
“Exposing young people to normative and unrealistic images of bodies leads to a sense of self-depreciation and poor self-esteem that can impact health-related behavior.”— Marisol Touraine, wwd.com
“What you need to know is that my life is split in two, cleaved not so neatly. There is the before and the after. Before I gained weight. After I gained weight. Before I was raped. After I was raped.”— Roxane Gay, amazon.com
“The cultural measure for obesity often seems to be anyone who appears to be larger than a size 6, or anyone whose body doesn't naturally cater to the male gaze, or anyone with cellulite on her thighs.”— Roxane Gay, amazon.com
“I wish I had the kind of strength and willpower to tell you a triumphant story. I am in search of that kind of strength and willpower. I am determined to be more than my body–what my body has endured, what my body has become. Determination, though, has not gotten me very far.”— Roxane Gay, amazon.com
“If there's anything in this world that we do not need, it is women telling other women that their bodies aren't good enough for some reason, that we should look a certain way. We already get that every single day from the media and from men, we don't need to hear it from each other.”— Colleen Ballinger, youtube.com
“Some girls hate their bodies, stand in the mirror and wait for the feedback.”— Arcade Fire, open.spotify.com
“Your weight does not reduce the quality of your soul. You are not the number on your scale–neither your worth nor your intelligence nor your beauty are measured by it. No matter what size you are, you still deserve to be loved and deserve nothing less than love.”— Maxwell Diawuoh, maxwelldpoetry.tumblr.com
“I put photos of myself and my cellulite and my stretch marks online, and I don’t retouch them on purpose because my body is the average size of the American woman. It’s important to embrace who you are when you look in the mirror because, at the end of the day, it’s all you’ve got.”— Ashley Graham, vogue.com
“You just can't let your entire life go by worrying about your damned thighs. You'd never find happiness.”— Sarah Gilbert, amazon.com
“The body, for good or ill, has become a primary marker of identity in this transient society where the extended family and old community ties have broken down. Style is cyclic: all standards will eventually change. But that may not be soon enough for young people (increasingly male as well as female…”— Camille Paglia, amazon.com
“Look in the mirror and say, There is none other like you and for that reason alone you are beautiful.”— Miranda Hart, amazon.com
“Remember that your body is a vessel for the wild, extraordinary thing that lives inside you.”— Nikita Gill, shopcatalog.com