Bodies Quotes

“The bodies in my floor all trusted someone. Now I walk on them to tea.”
― Victoria Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic

“How beautiful would it be if we could just see souls instead of bodies? To see love and compassion instead of curves.”
― Karen Quan, Write like no one is reading 2

“Young girls are like helpless children in the hands of amorous men, whatever is said to them is true and whatever manipulation on their bodies seems like love to them, sooner or later, they come back to their senses, but the scars are not dead inasmuch as her spoiler lives.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Scars Of Beauty

“Bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from the outside.”
― Egon Schiele

“There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“Heavenly bodies are nests of invisible birds.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, The Creator

“Are we our bodies? Is a small person less than a big person, then? If we were our bodies, then when we lost an arm, or a leg, would we be less, would we begin to fade from existence? No. We are the same person.

We are not our bodies; we are our thoughts. As they form, they define who we are, and create the reality of our existence.”
― Terry Goodkind, Blood of the Fold

“He knew how to handle pain. You had to lie down with pain, not draw back away from it. You let yourself sort of move around the outside edge of pain like with cold water until you finally got up your nerve to take yourself in hand. Then you took a deep breath and dove in and let yourself sink down it clear to the bottom. And after you had been down inside pain a while you found that like with cold water it was not nearly as cold as you had thought it was when your muscles were cringing themselves away from the outside edge of it as you moved around it trying to get up your nerve. He knew pain.”
― James Jones, From Here to Eternity

“Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.”
― E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

“We are more than the bodies we inhabit," Fawkes said. "They're little more than clothes, and yet we judge so much by them.”
― Michael J. Sullivan, The Death of Dulgath

“The difference between men and women is this--if you catch a woman butt-naked, she tries to cover the private parts with her hands. A man will sit there just like you found him even if he doesn't have much to be proud of.”
― Deb Baker, Murder Passes the Buck

“Adrian had always found it amusing that a guy could be drilling Stacia up her ass while she considered herself to be a virgin. Her intent had been to present herself as such when she found "Mr. Right.”
― Jess C Scott, Master & Servant

“However, I don’t understand why people insist on pitting the concepts of evolution and creation against each other. Why can’t they see that spiritualism and science are one? That bodies evolve and souls evolve and the universe is a fluid place that marries them both in a wonderful package called a human being. What’s wrong with that idea?”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“These are the ruins
I mapped onto my body so I might always be lost.”
― Traci Brimhall

“Time erodes us all.”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was

“I came to regard my body in a new light. For the first time I apprehended the little mounds on my chest as teats for the suckling of young, and their physical resemblance to udders on cows or the swinging distensions on lactating hounds was suddenly unavoidable. Funny how even women forget what breasts are for.

The cleft between my legs transformed as well. It lost a certain outrageousness, an obscenity, or achieved an obscenity of a different sort. The flaps seemed to open not to a narrow, snug dead end, but to something yawning. The passageway itself became a route to somewhere else, a real place, and not merely to a darkness in my mind. The twist of flesh in front took on a devious aspect, its inclusion overtly ulterior, a tempter, a sweetener for doing the species' heavy lifting, like the lollipops I once got at the dentist.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Women have been programmed to view our bodies only in terms of how they look and feel to others, rather than how they feel to ourselves, and how we wish to use them. We are surrounded by media images portraying women as essentially decorative machines of consumer function, constantly doing battle with rampant decay. (Take your vitamins every day and he might keep you, if you don’t forget to whiten your teeth, cover up your smells, color your grey hair and iron out your wrinkles....) As women, we fight this depersonalization every day, this pressure toward the conversion of one’s own self-image into a media expectation of what might satisfy male demand.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

“How to care for the injured body,

the kind of body that can't hold
the content it is living?”
― Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

“In the end, there's only one thing you can believe. Bodies are honest; they don't lie.”
― Megan Chance, The Spiritualist

“We invited each other into our spaces when parents would allow – girls only in these altars of beauty. We were christened into girlhood, not by holy water or the consumption of Christ’s body and blood, but with these rituals – painting each other’s faces, playing with each other’s hair, making each other over, doing our worst because we were allowed and laughing until we lost all control of our limbs, collapsing in a heavy pile of happy tears. There was an intimacy that was so pure, as deep as if we were real sisters. Our lips frosted with sugar, giggling under duvets, talking about kisses and crushes and trying our hardest not to fall asleep – fighting to keep the night alive.”
― Ellen Atlanta, Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women

“The sofa was lumpy enough to have had a body sewed into it; stuffing spilled out of the arms where the victim had tried to escape.”
― Christopher Moore, Coyote Blue

“If I have to inhabit a fragile meat vessel that could disintegrate at any moment, at least don't make me think about it all the time.”
― Caroline Crampton, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria

“My body parts disgust him. Maybe my bloated belly isn't fluid retention but a storage of tears from all my silent cries.”
― Vanessa de Largie, Don't Hit Me!

“We’re shapeshifters, women—beasts, but everyone likes to hush that up.”
― Katherine Leyton, Motherlike

“Bodies can catch feelings as easily as catch fire: affect leaps from one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting fear—in short, communicable affect can inflame nerves and muscles in a conflagration of every conceivable kind of passion.”
― Anna Gibbs

“We take off our shoes, or we turn on our ears. We press our hands together in a gesture of prayer, or we remember the full extent of our lungs. Perhaps we even arrange ourselves cross-legged on the ground, or perhaps we dance or walk or swim instead. When we want to escape the surface, we activate our bodies, and they show us a different intelligence, pointing to a mind that resides not just in the head. Our knowing is diffused throughout all of us, distributed through muscle and bone, pulsing through organs and conveyed in the blood. We put our feet to the ground to listen with all of it.

Not all that we know is verbal. Much of it--sometimes I think the vast majority--is somatic, the concern of the body. I learned this most keenly when Bert was a baby, and I used to reach towards him in the back seat on long car journeys and feel his foot press into my palm in reply. There was communication there far beyond words, and far more soothing to both of us. When I used to sit him on my lap and kiss his soft head, I was aware that information was being exchanged between us, transmitted through my lips and received through my nose. I could not even tell you what it said. Our bodies have answers to questions that we don't know how to ask.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“A woman’s body is exceedingly more demanding than her heart.”
― Hemley Boum, Days Come and Go

“We felt as if we were just one body—bone, blood, flesh—that momentarily splits apart to come back together, pulled by the irremediable need for touch.”
― Gabriela Ponce, Blood Red

“our bodies, our misshapen, lumpy, wobbly, birth-marked, uneven, scarred, imperfect bodies are our vessels. If only we were more gracious towards them. They won't last forever, they will eventually grow frail, we will miss the strength and vigour of our younger selves. But, for now, when alive, when upright, when walking through days with purpose, without pain, they are vessels for adventure, for sleep, for song, for dance, and a place where we experience joy.”
― Julia Baird, Bright Shining: How Grace Changes Everything

“Nakedness, even among women in private, is still uncommon, uncouth. Bodies are meant to be guarded like gold. The flash of a bare ankle is like dropping a pendant, so that everyone can see it clatter to the ground and know that you hold its richness and likely more. What else are you hiding in your stores, against your breast? How easily might it be stolen? You cannot blame a man for snatching something which has been taunted in front of him like meat before a dog.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth