Quotes About Self-expression

I want that freedom to move around outdoors, to do so without always feeling watched, threatened, restricted, or accountable to someone. To not be a babe—innocent or lusty. To just be in the woods.

It's important to still look like yourself on your wedding day, so I didn't do anything drastic.

I just find it extraordinary that you think you have something to say.

You get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that's hard to unravel.

mind Nell was writing: —ornamentation of neck, wrists, fingers —paint on face only

To me, 'sexual freedom' means freedom from having to have sex.

Fuck Kerouac; he would write his own story.

Sometimes there is more to a person's need for white picket fences than safety, just as sometimes there is more to a person's rebellion than the need to lash out against rules.

Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography. You could wear, once more, your own life in all its stages, from whatever they wrapped you in when you emerged from the dark red naked warmth of the womb to your deathbed.

I can't be a man. But I can embrace the head of a man, the intelligence of a man, the spirit of a man.

My mom is going to kill me for talking about sleeping with people. But I don't want to put myself in the position where I'm in a monogamous relationship right now. I'm not dating just one person. 'Sex and the City' changed everything for me because those girls would sleep with so many people.

We're so quick to cut away pieces of ourselves to suit a particular relationship, a job, a circle of friends, incessantly editing who we are until we fit in.

My theory about writing is that one should write books you'd like to read, but no one else has written yet. So, as long as I stick with that, I'm entertaining myself, and then hopefully my readers as well. I hope to god I realize that I'm repeating myself, if I ever do. But if I don't, I'm sure my readers will let me know.

Everybody wants me to be what they want me to be but I'm not happy when I try to fake it.

Should what you get up to fail to comport with who you think you are, something is surely inaccurate (and likely optimistic) about who you think you are.

The fact that my clothing has been visually available to other people I do not find upsetting. The body is another matter. It is mine; I have found it useful; but it is an avatar.

Beautiful things should not be kept behind glass, they should be used. Just as beautiful women should live fully and not let herself turn into a hothouse flower, pampered and useless.

I'd like to say I'm not dressed up for anyone in particular, but that would be a lie.

More than we realize, girls understand us to be saying that they must always be utterly and completely forthright. That's a problem, especially when we combine it with the cultural injunction to be agreeable. A girl can't actually accomplish both because, like any other human, every girl contains a world of complicated thoughts and feelings. She cannot possibly be simultaneously see-through and utterly pleasing to others.

Complaining to you allows your daughter to bring the best of herself to school.

Girls also use online environments to try on personas that don't really match their actual personalities. By posting risqué comments or images that suggest sophistication, girls sometimes conduct digital experiments in parting with childhood.

Don't sublimate your own freedom and desires in order to satisfy the invisible judgments of others against hypothetical wrongdoings.

And you will always be so much more than a label.

of walking about with a shaved head, he walked past Whackadoo. He saw neither Romola nor Joey, but it didn't matter. Just the very act of allowing himself to be seen in this new and somewhat alarming guise was exciting