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My Body

Emily Ratajkowski

Top 10 Best Quotes

“In my early twenties, it had never occurred to me that the women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to the men whose desire granted them that power in the first place. Those men were the ones in control, not the women the world fawned over. Facing the reality of the dynamics at play would have meant admitting how limited my power really was—how limited any woman’s power is when she survives and even succeeds in the world as a thing to be looked at.”

“I so desperately craved men's validation that I accepted it even when it came wrapped in disrespect.”

“I read once that women are more likely than men to cry when they are angry. I know that women cry out of shame. We are afraid of our anger, embarrassed by the way that it transforms us. We cry to quell what we feel, even when it's trying to tell us something, even when it has every right to exist.”

“Men never notice the overcalculating that women do. They think things happen "for some weird reason" while women sing songs and do backbends and dance elaborate moves to make those things happen.”

“I wonder how many women you've disregarded in your life, written off, because you assumed they had nothing to offer beyond the way they looked. How quickly they learned that the stuff in their heads was of less value than the shape of their bodies. I bet they were all smarter than you.”

“I will proclaim all of my mistakes and contradictions, for all the women who cannot do so, for all the women we've called muses without learning their names, whose silence we mistook for consent. I stood on their shoulders to get here.”

“You thought you were a mind, but you're a body.”

“Lines were never clear between us. The house didn’t help: it was a place with no boundaries. Children who grow up in homes like mine, just them and their parents with no separation, physically or emotionally, become experts in a very particular type of seeing. We learn to see things that are hidden, and things that aren’t there at all. We become particularly sensitive to the moods and emotions of others. We are nimble and excellent at shape-shifting. We oscillate between feeling special and feeling alone. We feel simultaneously capable of both saving and destroying those we love.”

“Apples and oranges, my therapist tells me. What if you're not the same as other women, what if you're an entirely different fruit? she asks gently. But everyone has a favorite fruit, I tell her. I feel a tear run down my cheek. Everyone prefers one over the other. That is how the world works; everything is ranked. One is always better than the other.”

“My mother seems to hold the way my beauty is affirmed by the world like a mirror, reflecting back to her a measure of her own worth.”

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Book Keywords:

realization, reflection, life, life-lessons, women-and-men, reality-of-life, women

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