Quotes About Appearance

We were marvelously diverse... and yet we were not: all of us, Sherman included, hailed from the same elite universities- Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale; we all exuded a sense of confident self-satisfaction; and not one of us was either short or overweight.

muscularity, made more pronounced by her gauntness, and the near-inanimate

The victor in the Democratic primary was State Senator Bill Sarpalius, who got a leg up one night in January when a disgruntled patriot slugged him so hard it broke his jaw and the jaw had to be wired shut for most of the campaign. For most politicians, that would constitute an electoral handicap, but since Sarpalius is not bent over double with intellect, it proved a boon. He's a tall, nice-looking, apple-cheeked fellow, and if you don't have to listen to him, he looks good.

A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.

How much the more in judging of the human heart should we distrust all fashionable airs and graces, all tricks and smartness, learnt only to please the outward gaze

Women are by nature blithely content to allow others to deceive them. You know full well these tales have only the slightest connection to reality, and yet you let your heart be moved by trivial words and get so caught up in the plots that you copy them out without giving a thought to the tangled mess your hair has become in this humid weather.

Appearance is the most public part of the self. It is our sacrament, the visible self that the world assumes to be a mirror of the invisible, inner self.

The day on which he [Épernon] arrives, and so long as he remains, I shall dress myself in garments which I shall never wear again: those of dissimulation and hypocrisy

Houses are entirely different when you know them well, she thought, and on first acquaintance even more different from their real selves, more deceptive about their real character than human beings.

Sure enough, standing with their backs to the hall fire, were Aunt Sadie, Aunt Emily, and a small, fair, and apparently young man. My immediate impression was that he did not seem at all like a husband. He looked kind and gentle.

Horses sweat, you know, and men perspire, whereas ladies glow. I am sure I looked all of a glow also. Indeed, I could feel all-of-a-glow trickling down my sides beneath my corset, the steel ribs of which jabbed me under the arms most annoyingly.

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction. —Oscar Wilde

Even I don't wake up looking like Cindy Crawford. —Cindy Crawford

His name tasted of fire and wings, of curling smoke, of subtlety and strength and the rasping whisper of scales. He eyed me and said stiffly, Don't land yourself into a boiling-pot, and as difficult as you may find it, try and present a respectable appearance.

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.

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.

Female thinness and youth are not in themselves next to godliness in this culture. Society really doesn't care about women's appearance per se. What genuinely matters is that women remain willing to let others tell them what they can and cannot have. Women are watched, in other words, not to make sure that they will "be good," but to make sure that they will know they are being watched.

In drawing attention to the physical characteristics of women leaders, they can be dismissed as either too pretty or too ugly. The net effect is to prevent women's identification with the issues. If the public women is stigmatized as too 'pretty,' she's a threat, a rival--or simply not serious; if derided as too 'ugly,' one risks tarring oneself with the same brush by identifying oneself with her agenda.

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

When faced with the myth, the questions to ask are not about women's faces and bodies but about the power relations of the situation. Who is this serving? Who says? Who profits? When someone discusses a woman's appearance to her face, she can ask herself, is it that person's business? Are the power relations equal? Would she feel comfortable making the same personal comments in return?

Unfortunately, since the media routinely give accounts of women's appearance in a way that trivializes or discredits what they say, women reading or watching are routinely dissuaded from identifying with women in the public eye—the ultimate anti-feminist goal of the beauty myth.

Is beauty really sex? Does a woman's sexuality correspond to what she looks like? Does she have the right to sexual pleasure and self-esteem because she's a person, or must she earn that right through beauty, as she used to through marriage?

This ritual use of constant surveillance is a vivid example of the real motivation behind the myth: Female thinness and youth are not in themselves next to godliness in this culture. Society really doesn't care about women's appearance per se. What genuinely matters is that women remain willing to let others tell them what they can and cannot have. Women are watched, in other words, not to make sure that they will be good, but to make sure that they will know they are being watched.

What women look like is considered important because what we say is not.