Quotes About Beauty

Little Irina must be a woman grown by now. A beauty, I have heard, surely?' It was more mockery: he had heard nothing of the sort, of course. I had traveled with my father; the court and his advisers knew I was nothing out of the ordinary, and hardly a girl to turn a young tsar's head - if he had been in any danger of turning his head at all, except perhaps all the way round like an owl.

I was a glaring blot on the perfection. But I didn't care: I didn't feel I owed him beauty.

Her beautiful face was blank as an unwritten book.

There were forest depths in her eyes, green and unending.

Galina would not know where they came from; Palmira would not. Better not to know. To them they could be jewels, rich and fine, that someone had bought and paid for with gold and not with blood. They would have gone far enough away from the cruelty that made them, and then they could be only beautiful.

There were those lines at the corners of his eye and mouth, if I looked for them, but that was all that betrayed his years. In everything else, he was a young man: the still-hard edges of his profile, his dark hair untouched with silver, his pale smooth unweathered cheek, his long and graceful hands.

My mother had enough magic to give me three blessings before she died. The first was wit; the second beauty, and the third — that fools should recognize neither.

Su nombre sabía a fuego y a alas, a volutas de humo, a sutileza y a fuerza, y al rasposo susurro de las escamas.

Every day is a poetry day.

The thousands small birds of January in their smooth soaring cloud finding the trees.

To know the difference, you must run this mountain without pause. In the evening or the afternoon, you must cross the first fields waking to your footsteps, stormwashed at the foothills. In the evening or the afternoon, in the closing of a shadowline, you must read aloud the reddened last words of this canyon's leaves to the trees that clap their hands.

as a boy stands back from his earlier self mocking it and the light of fireflies blinking against an old fence has become as sad as it is lovely because so many hands are gone by now it is not that we wanted the light to be caught      but reached for that was it

No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.

When [beauty pornography is] aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman--known, marked, lined, familiar—-who hands him the paper every morning.

The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold. Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it is an operable condition.

The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking beautiful. If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.

Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.

Let's be shameless. Be greedy. Pursue pleasure. Avoid pain. Wear and touch and eat and drink what we feel like. Tolerate other women's choices. Seek out the sex we want and fight fiercely against the sex we do not want. Choose our own causes And once we break through and change the rules so our sense of our own beauty cannot be shaken, sing that beauty and dress it up and flaunt it and revel in it.

Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both.

She may resent Playboy because she resents feeling ugly in sex--or, if beautiful, her body defined and diminished by pornography. It inhibits in her something she needs to live, and gives her the ultimate anaphrodisiac: the self-critical sexual gaze. Alice Walker's essay Coming Apart investigates the damage done: Comparing herself to her lover's pornography, her heroine foolishly decides that she is not beautiful.

As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement.

Beauty and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be beautiful to be sexual. That of course is not true at all. The definitions of both beautiful and sexual constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection between the two is a recent invention.

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.

Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West is is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.