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Appearance
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“ There is a sound reason why one and a half billion dollars are spent for cosmetics in your country every year, and only half that sum for education: There are no naturally pretty girls in the United States.”
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“He had the look of an insect whose body has been eaten out, leaving only the wings, the shell.”
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“Appearances have very little to do with happiness.”
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“To superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect, looking as if it were being gradually reabsorbed. And it did indeed cause him some difficulty about the fit of his satin stocks, for which chins were at that time useful.”
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“He tried, poor fellow, to assume his grand manner, but all in vain; he was like a drenched and dripping rooster, trying to crow in the rain.”
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“Englishmen have a genius for looking uncomfortable. Their feelings are terribly mixed up with their personal appearance.”
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“Her clothes gave the impression that she had survived a struggle with savages seeking to disrobe her.”
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“I don't think I know a single woman who knows what she looks like.”
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“The tragedy of our time is not that we are so eye centered, so appearance besotted. The tragedy is that we do not know what we like until we are told by our advertisers and entertainers.”
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“His mouth was as thin as the cutting edge of an axe and it turned down at the corners in the same way.”
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“She had a plump little mouth like a buttonhole worked with a heavy satin stitch.”
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“... he wore a glittering brass helmet much too large for him and looked, so my mother said, like a weevil in a nut.”
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“General de Gaulle is again pictured in our newspapers, looking as usual like an embattled codfish.”
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“[On an anarchist acquaintance:] Everything in appearance the most alarmist aunt could wish.”
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“... she is ugly as sin.”
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“It was the throats of women that died first. With men it was the nape of the neck. It withered or it grew heavy; men wrote their lives there, where they could not see what they had written. But with women it was the throat.”
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“She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.”
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“Her greedy black eyes and the way she held her head on one side made her look as if she were always guessing the price of something.”
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“Looks might enhance your sense of entitlement, but they do nothing to build your confidence in your ability to rule the realm.”
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“He looked home-made, as though his wife had self-consciously knitted or somehow contrived a husband when she sat alone at night.”
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“... I looked like the wrath of grapes.”
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“Personal appearance is looking the best you can for the money.”
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“He hated himself for being bald and middle-aged in a culture that was all youth and hair.”
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“Appearance is the most public part of the self. It is our sacrament, the visible self that the world assumes to be a mirror of the invisible, inner self.”
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“I don't look this way out of ignorance. If people think that I do, they're dumber than I am.”
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“... lots of women buy just as many wigs and makeup things as I do ... They just don't wear them all at the same time.”
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“If I seem strange to people, I guess it's because I look so artificial and I am so real. My looks sort of collide with the way I am.”
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“A peacock that rests on his feathers is just another turkey.”
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“Last night she got so vexed she wouldn't talk to him at all. She just swelled up like a toad-fish and sat and looked at the fire without cracking her teeth.”
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“They were drinking ginger ale on her front porch and she kept rattling the ice in her glass, rattling her beads, rattling her bracelet like an impatient pony jingling its harness.”
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“He looked like a goat. He had little raisin eyes and a string beard ...”
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“My appearance is talking and I like what it is saying.”
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“My sort of looks are of the kind that bore me when I see them on other people.”
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“He reminded one of a bottle with the cork driven in too far. One longed to get hold of his head and pull it out sharply so as to give him a bit more neck.”
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“Rosalie had to wait many years till at last she realized that her ugliness was only in the eye of the beholder, Mama, and that actually she too was good-looking ...”
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“They say it's worse to be ugly. I think it must only be different. If you're pretty, you are subject to one set of assaults; if you're plain you are subject to another.”
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“... good looks build character, as there is so much more temptation to overcome.”
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“She looked like a woman who was being sent to a mental institution, but did not know it.”
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“Not even a hand-stitched suit could hide a body gone ruinously to seed. I was tempted to offer some fashion advice, but I didn't think he'd welcome the news that this year, bellies are being worn inside the trousers.”
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“I think women see me on the cover of magazines and think I never have a pimple or bags under my eyes. You have to realize that's after two hours of hair and makeup, plus retouching. Even I don't wake up looking like Cindy Crawford.”
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“I am very strong & robust & not of the delicate sex nor of the fair but of the deficent in look ...”
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“Life is not a dress size.”
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“In the short distance between the two houses he had somehow managed to acquire the ragged, spent look of a man who had crossed a continent on horseback.”
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“... I think a woman looks her second best pouring coffee.”
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“I always say that a girl never really looks as well as she does on board a steamship, or even a yacht.”
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“Sex appeal is fifty per cent what you've got and fifty per cent what people think you've got.”
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“Honey, do I know about beauty? I was a blonde when nobody ever dreamed of it. I never thought makeup was something you did after an argument.”
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“... suppose you invest time and effort in designing a new image for yourself. You get home and your husband takes one look and screams, 'Was the other person hurt? I see you've been in a head-on collision.' ... Men hate any change.”
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“Walter has been a stockbroker for years. My theory is that he looked like one when he was born and naturally gravitated toward the profession.”
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“She had once been described, by one who saw below the surface, as a perfectly beautiful woman in an absolutely plain shell.”
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“Why not be one's self? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?”
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“For just once in my life, I'd like to get through a whole week without having to deal with some fool, white or black, who's got an attitude about the way I look.”
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“My advice to actresses is don't worry about your looks. The very thing that makes you unhappy in your appearance may be the one thing to make you a star.”
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“There's less in this than meets the eye.”
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“Animals don't even try to look any different from what nature intended. They humbly wear their shells, scales, spines, plumes, pelts, and down. ... The conscious impulse to change one's appearance is found only among humans.”
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“With her skin deeply tanned by constant exposure to the sun, she had the shriveled appearance of a wind-dried shrimp.”
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“He was a vast red man with untidy hair, prominent eyes, and a loud voice. The state of his clothes suggested that he'd been dragged by the heels through some major disaster.”
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“Youth and beauty are not accomplishments, they're the temporary happy by-products of time and/or DNA.”
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“... he had a sharp nose and very little face below that, as if nature had made her point with the nose and then lost interest, so that his face dribbled back into his neck.”
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“Very few of us are what we seem.”
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“The appearance of well-being, status, power, and prestige creates well-being, status, power, and prestige.”
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“I think how you look is the most important thing in the world. If you look cute, you are cute; if you look smart, you are smart, and if you don't look like anything, you aren't anything.”
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“To be a king and wear a crown is more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasure to them that bear it ...”
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“... it is a curious fact, but one which all experience owns, that people do not desire so much to appear better, as to appear different from what they really are.”
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“Acting a part is not always synonymous with lying; it is far more often the best way of serving the truth. It is more truthful to act what we should feel if the community is to be well served rather than behave as we actually do feel in our selfish private feelings.”
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“[We] talked on about household forms and ceremonies, as if we all believed that our hostess had a regular servants' hall ... instead of the one little charity-school maiden, whose short ruddy arms could never have been strong enough to carry the tray up-stairs, if she had not been assisted in private by her mistress, who now sat in state, pretending not to know what cakes were sent up; though she knew, and we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew, she had been busy all the morning making tea-bread and sponge cakes.”
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“You labor under the hallucination that I felt merry when I wrote all that nonsense! Not a bit of it; it's a way I have, when I can't find a razor handy to cut my throat!”
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“... like other potentates with a long habit of arbitrary authority, she covered her perplexity with a smart show of decision.”
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“Some folks mistakes all they see for all there is.”
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“Conventionality is the tacit agreement to set appearances before reality, form before content ...”
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“Reality has changed chameleonlike before my eyes so many times that I have learned, or am learning, to trust almost anything except what appears to be so.”
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“A man of fashion does not like to be reckoned poor, no more than he likes to be reckoned unhappy. We none of us endeavor to be happy, Sir, but merely to be thought so; and for my part, I had rather be in a state of misery, and envied for my supposed happiness, than in a state of happiness, and pitied for my supposed misery.”
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“When my daughter looks at me, she sees a small old lady. That is because she sees only with her outside eyes. She has no chuming, no inside knowing of things. If she had chuming she would see a tiger lady. And she would have careful fear.”
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“She had ... the over-alert look of a ventriloquist's dummy.”
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“We tend to tell strangers what we think will make us sound good. I myself, to my utter amazement, informed a telephone pollster that I exercised regularly, a bare-faced lie.”
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“If you are being run out of town, get in front of the crowd and make it look like a parade.”
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“It's easy to make money. You put up the sign Bank and someone walks in and hands you his money. The façade is everything.”
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“... he was declaring the ardour of his passion in such terms as but too often make vehemence pass for sincerity ...”
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“... there is no fire without smoke but there is often smoke without fire.”
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“... the essence of vulgarity seemed to lie in the pretence at being or the attempt to be, something that one really was not, with the resulting lack of ease and dignity and taste.”
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“... affectation hath always had a greater share both in the action and discourse of men than truth and judgment have ...”
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“... Vermer tried a pass at me, after giving me lunch one day, and later had tall tales to tell, but that is not uncommon among inferior men. He was only one of a long series of males, who for one reason or another, to boost their own ego, find it satisfying to boast of what they have not achieved.”
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“You'd pass me on the street/ As well, a 'normal,' / Someone who traded / In her essentials for / A look of haunted / Responsibility.”
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“... people's desires are in proportion to their lifestyle ... Houses can lie as easily as humans.”
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“Here's what a lot of the media want us to believe: One day, we'll get everything right about our appearance. Our hair will look fabulous, our skin will be smooth and crease-free, men will have perfect six-pack abs and we'll be three sizes smaller than we are now. We'll look so good we'll have made over not just our looks but our lives.”
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“Having the right image — the way people see you — is crucial to getting what you want from work: respect, raises, promotions, good working relationships, and an easier time of it all around. This holds for everyone in the workplace, but the 'right' image is particularly essential for women because they have to overcome the handicap of being the 'wrong' sex.”
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“... in politics as in life, what is known is not necessarily what is believed, what is shown is not necessarily what is seen, and what is said is not necessarily what is heard.”
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“Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth ... But we seem to have no other.”
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“He longed to make a mark, or, to express it more vulgarly, cut a figure. Now, fortunately or unfortunately, the number of figures which can be cut in the world is practically unlimited; the only difficulty is to cut precisely the kind of figure one would wish.”
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“There is more here than meets the eye ...”
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“The longer I stay in the States, the more I understand how important it is to smile and seem like a nice guy. Like Ronald Reagan. Your image seems to count more than what you do.”
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“It is a fact that you can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe in it.”
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“As usual she had a deceptive air of perspicacity.”
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“Now, see there. Just because I'm wearing my Super-Dike sweatshirt, you think I'm a lesbian. I guess if I were wearing a string of pearls, you'd think I was an oyster.”
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“... dealing with loss and heartache doesn't make you stronger. It only makes people think you are.”