physical appearances Quotes

“She was dazzling-- alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.”

“You may go— Or tell me why are you staring at my nose!”

“And to complete This Punchinello figure—such a nose!— My lords, there is no such nose as that nose.”

“For a great nose indicates a great man.”

“The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.”

“‘You see this scar on the top of my head?’ He tilted his head to show me. ‘I got that scar in Greene County, Alabama trying to register to vote in 1964. You see this scar on the side of my head? […] I got that scar in Mississippi demanding civil rights. […] These aren’t my scars, cuts and bruises. These are my medals of honor.‘”

“There is no question. I have to have this scarf. I have to have it. It makes my eyes look bigger, it makes my haircut look more expensive, it makes me look like a different person. I’ll be able to wear it with everything. People will refer to me as the Girl in the Denny and George Scarf.”

“If everyone could just wear new clothes every day, I reckon depression wouldn’t exist anymore.”

“She doesn’t brush her hair a thousand times at night, or pluck her eyebrows, or bathe with sesame oil so her skin will stay smooth. In a world without love, what is the point of any of that?”

“No one has said I borrowed the money. I could have got it in some other way. I could have got it from an admirer. When a girl’s as pretty as I am.”

“Plenty of people are good-looking. That doesn’t make them interesting or intriguing or cool.”

“Away from my mother, away from my grandparents, I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.”

“My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn’t, couldn’t, end there.”

“His skin was dead looking and hairless; dropsical too, he moved with a shambling gait like a trained bear. His hair was pale and fine. It had been brushed smoothly down upon his brow like that of children in daguerrotypes. His eyes were clear, of the pale sweet blue of cornflowers, his thick mouth hung open, drooling a little.”

“I can’t say sweet things. But you are beautiful.”

“I’ve heard people say that the more you like someone, the more you think they are beautiful even if you didn’t think so at the beginning.”

“I am not the girl I used to be. I am no longer desirable, I’m off-putting in some way. It’s not just that I’ve put on weight, or that my face is puffy from the drinking and the lack of sleep; it’s as if people can see the damage written all over me, can see it in my face, the way I hold myself, the way I move.”

“Let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as mothers.”

“My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.”

“Listen, Tally. That’s not what’s important to me. What’s inside you matters a lot more.”

“So what if people look more alike now? It’s the only way to make people equal.”

“There was something magic in their large and perfect eyes, something that made you want to pay attention to whatever they said, to protect them from any danger, to make them happy. They were so...pretty.”

“I read that the real Cleopatra wasn’t even that great-looking. She seduced everyone with how clever she was.”

“I don’t want to be ugly all my life. I want those perfect eyes and lips, and for everyone to look at me and gasp. And for everyone who sees me to think, ‘Who’s that?’ and want to get to know me, and listen to what I say.”

“Only when she sits before her mirror to apply her makeup with care does she become a geisha. And I don’t mean that this is when she begins to look like one. This is when she begins to think like one too.”

“Maybe you’re just too pretty yourself to be able to see it elsewhere.”

“In the years since, I’ve been called beautiful more often than I can remember. Though, of course, geisha are always called beautiful, even those who aren’t. But when Mr. Tanaka said it to me, before I’d ever heard of such a thing as a geisha, I could almost believe it was true.”

“It struck me as odd that even though no one could have called her a beauty, Mr. Tanaka’s eyes were fixed on her like a rag on a hook.”

“Every young geisha may be proud of her hairstyle at first, but she comes to hate it within three or four days.”

“Who I was before the accident is just a story now. Everything before now, before now, before now, is just a story I carry around. I guess that would apply to anybody in the world. What I need is a new story about who I am.”

“Society programs us, through the subliminal messages of popular culture, to believe that we’re not truly desirable as women unless we adhere to the current standards of physical beauty.”

“Even if you are aware that you may be struck down today and are firmly resolved to an inevitable death, if you are slain with an unseemly appearance, you will show your lack of previous resolve, will be despised by your enemy, and will appear unclean. For this reason it is said that both old and young should take care of their appearance.”

“God made you as you are on purpose. He gave you your looks, your height, your skin color, your nose, your personality. Nothing about you is by accident. You didn’t get overlooked. You didn’t get left out. God calls you His masterpiece. Instead of going around feeling down on yourself, unattractive, too tall, too short, not enough of this, or too much of that, dare to get up in the morning and say, “I am a masterpiece. I am created in the image of Almighty God.”

“Most of us, in ways that we are not entirely aware of, automatically associate leadership ability with imposing physical stature. We have a sense of what a leader is supposed to look like, and that stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other considerations.”

“Not long ago, researchers who analyzed the data from four large research studies that had followed thousands of people from birth to adulthood calculated that when corrected for such variables as age and gender and weight, an inch of height is worth $789 a year in salary. That means that a person who is six feet tall but otherwise identical to someone who is five foot five will make on average $5,525 more per year.”

“Some people look like they sound better than they actually sound, because they look confident and have good posture.”

“Mother, when you’re disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus’ mother in the museum.”

“A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She’s too pretty.”

“With more people on earth today, there are fewer Noodly Appendages to go around, so we each receive less touching--pushing down toward the earth--and thus, with less force downward, we’re taller.”

“This was the truth behind the handsome face and the miraculous powers, the truth that was the dead and empty space between the stars, a wasteland peopled by frightened monsters. ”

“I am quite independent of a physical image, and so are you.”

“Lust, I suspect, wears repatent stilettos, that feather boa and not much else. Maybe glossy red lipstick.”

“The Kanamit were not very pretty, it’s true. They looked something like pigs and something like people, and that is not an attractive combination. Seeing them for the first time shocked you; that was their handicap.”

“What was Sheila Tubman talking about? I looked the same as always. And why did she think Tootsie was lucky not to look like me? Unless it was my ears. Lately, they seemed too big.”

“Her dress was curious indeed. Pippi had made it herself. It was supposed to have been blue, but as there hadn’t been quite enough blue cloth, Pippi had decided to add little red patches here and there. On her long thin legs she wore long stockings, one brown and the other black.”

“His mane was like a crest, mounting, then falling low. His neck was long and slender, and arched to the small, savagely beautiful head. The head was that of the wildest of all creatures- a stallion born wild- and it was beautiful, savage, and splendid. A stallion with a wonderful physical perfection that matched his savage, ruthless spirit.”

“This is me. I’m the one with the pointy nose and beady eyes.”

“It’s quite simple,” my grandmother said. “All they’ve done is to shrink you and give you four legs and a furry coat, but they haven’t been able to change you into a one hundred percent mouse. You are still yourself in everything except your appearance.”

“When he had finished, Elmer looked like any other elephant.”

“He’s a very ordinary-looking, not ugly but not hot, miscellaneous boy.”

“He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.”

“She was so changed in appearance that Mirrim, passing her table just before the evening meal, almost failed to recognize her. Menolly had been worrying that Mirrim was deliberately avoiding her because Menolly had Impressed nine fire lizards, but there was no restraint in Mirrim’s manner.”

″‘Proud? Proud indeed!’ I recoiled from the venom of her attack. ‘It is a trick! This thing beauty they talk about. Believe me, it is a low trick put out by God self.’ Her face was flushed with anger. ‘He puts meaning into beauty, and reduces the meaning to nothing.‘”

″‘The difference is that in this picture you were fatter, with chubbier cheeks. But it’s you for sure!’ Realizing that our classmates were around, he added loudly, ‘Don’t think I wouldn’t recognize that jelly-donut face anywhere.‘”

″‘I love these old photographs. I collect them. This one is especially nice. Who is it?’ she asked. ‘My great-grandmother.’ ‘Of course. I should have guessed. You look so much alike. Anyone looking carefully would realize it. Your face is the same shape, you’ve got the same pointy chin- you’re a perfect copy.‘”

“My grandfather seemed to me stricken and afflicted, and indeed he was, like a man everlastingly struck by lightning, so that there was an ashiness about his clothes and his hair never settled and his eye had a look of tragic alarm when he wasn’t actually sleeping. He was the most unreposeful human being I ever knew...”

“So your momma finally broke down and bought you some clothes. About time.”

“It’s bad enough that I’m the darkest, worst-dressed thing in school. I’m also the tallest, skinniest thing you ever seen. And people like John-John remind me of it every chance they get. They don’t say nothing about the fact that I’m a math whiz, and can outdo ninth graders when it comes to figuring numbers. Or that I got a good memory and never forget one single, solitary thing I read. They only see what they see, and they don’t seem to like what they see much.”

“Stig did not seem much bigger than himself, but he looked very strong and his hands looked cleverer than his face. But how old was he? Ten? Twenty? A Hundred? A Thousand?”

“Borka had a beak, wings, and webbed feet like all her brothers and sisters, but she did not have any feathers.”

“Hugh Goch’s face was white and thin under the flame of his hair, long-boned and almost delicate, but his eyes were the cold, inhuman, gold-rimmed eyes of a bird of prey, and looking into them, Randal was more afraid than he had ever been in his life before.”

“But I think that anyone who had ever been subjected to the least exposure to what makes for beauty would likely toss the photograph aside with the gesture employed in brushing away a caterpillar, and mutter in profound revulsion, ‘What a dreadful child.‘”

Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.

My throat was formed, and such a throat! white, firm, and shaped like that of the Venus of Medici; and what eyes! what eyelids! what black eyebrows! such flames darted from my dark pupils that they eclipsed the scintillation of the stars--as I was told by the poets in our part of the world.”