Quotes About Vanity

I'm better than I look and I look fabulous.

We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra...

Because tanning and steroids are only a problem if you plan to live a long time.

Jump way back to one time, Evie and me did this fashion shoot in a junk yard, in a slaughterhouse, in a mortuary. We'd go anywhere to look good by comparison, and what I realize is mostly what I hate about Evie is the fact that she's so vain and stupid and needy. But what I hate most is how she's just like me. What I really hate is me so I hate pretty much everybody.

Kill me if I ever look that Bad . . . Dude, what are you saying? . . . On the TV? That is you, dude. From like five years ago.

Lovely, forgettable faces, born to flirt and fuck and die.

How she looks is watered-down. How she looks is disappearing. How she looks is erased. Don't stress, she says. This is just me not wearing any makeup.

How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash. I am Ozymandias, king of kings.

All of these stars, the most powerful actors in film, they were all gone in an instant.

Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it's the only way they can get anything really finished. The agent's yelling that no matter how great you look, your body is just something you wear to accept your Academy Award. Your hand is just so you can hold your Nobel Prize. Your lips are only there for you to air-kiss a talk show host.

In this maze of antiques, she says, are the ghosts of everyone who has ever owned this furniture. Everyone rich and successful enough to prove it. All of their talent and intelligence and beauty outlived by decorative junk. All the success and accomplishments this furniture was supposed to represent, it's all vanished.

Man is the only animal that when you pat him on the head, his head swells up.

You are in love with yourself, aren't you?" He hmphed. "Someone has to be.

even reflected glory can be intoxicating.

If you choose to stay with us, Jaime, and if we choose to accept you, the pride, the vanity, must go. You will learn by observing and experiencing the training process, which, as you're probably gathering, won't always be easy and won't always be fun. But in the process, if you can set aside your preconceptions, your fear, and most especially your ego, you will achieve a level of peace and actualization that is tremendously freeing." Jaime

I have put my arm down forever to interrupt the men who want more hair. from the poem Pasadena collected in Own Face (1978)

Yes, he knew his face was finely made, his forehead broad, his gaze haunting, his lips sculpted so that even a sneer looked fetching on them, but he needed a living mirror to tell him so.

In The Secret Life we see the Outsider cut off from other people by an intelligence that ruthlessly destroys their values, and prevents him from self-expression through his inability to substitute new values. His problem is Ecclesiastes' 'Vanitatum vanitas'; nothing is worth doing.

The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.

The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple--hate your enemy, know nothing of him.

When I was seventeen I had a body that Adam woulda dropped Eve for. Hot-potato time. It was prime, no lie. Nothing in the wrong place. I had legs a hundred miles long and a booty to die for. Adam woulda said to Eve, Eve, I'm leaving you, honey, and Jesus himself woulda been in the background saying, Adam, you're one lucky motherfucker.

Always the same seesaw. The fear that my scribbling could get me put into a concentration camp. The feeling that it is my duty to write, that it is my life's task, my calling. The feeling of vanitas vanitatum, that my scribbling is worthless. In the end I go on writing anyway, the diary, the Curriculum.

Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.

Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.