Welcome to the web’s most comprehensive site of quotations by women. 43,939 quotations are searchable by topic, by author's name, or by keyword. Many of them appear in no other collection. And new ones are added continually.
Search by Topic:
Find quotations by TOPIC (coffee, love, dogs)
or search alphabetically below.
Search by Last Name:
Search by Keyword:
Weight
-
“Lucy decided to forget her weight just this once and enjoy herself. This was a decision she made with deplorable frequency. ”
-
“Having a lean and hungry look was frowned upon in my Italian neighborhood where a girl was considered too skinny if she could make her knees touch.”
-
“When a person who is fat says it runs in the family, you can be pretty sure the family never did much running.”
-
“From the day on which she weighs 140, the chief excitement of a woman's life consists in spotting women who are fatter than she is.”
-
“Mr. Richards is a tall man with what must have been a magnificent build before his stomach went in for a career of its own.”
-
“A small waist makes you tire easily.”
-
“I had no intention of giving her my vital statistics. 'Let me put it this way,' I said. 'According to my girth, I should be a ninety-foot redwood.'”
-
“I have dieted continuously for the last two decades and lost a total of 758 pounds. By all calculations, I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.”
-
“Women should try to increase their size rather than decrease it, because I believe the bigger we are, the more space we'll take up, and the more we'll have to be reckoned with. I think every woman should be fat like me.”
-
“You know what, when I was thin, I thought there was a fat girl trying to get out of me.”
-
“I have a fierce eating disorder that has survived even bariatric surgery. I got even fatter after that! Hey, maybe fat people are just trying to get closer to others, did anybody ever that of that?!”
-
“'Helen, I wish you'd lay off that fudge, you're going to be fat and waddle just like your mother.' ... 'Honey, why don't we both go on a diet and buy some new clothes?' There is a right way to put things and a wrong way. ”
-
“Men who can eat anything they want and not gain weight should do it out of sight of the women they're married to.”
-
“... everything from television to fashion ads has made it seem wicked to cast a shadow. This wild emaciated look appeals to some women, though not to many men, who are seldom seen pinning up a Vogue illustration in a machine shop.”
-
“I could eat a feeling faster than anybody, put a little hot sauce on it and wouldn't recognize it until it showed up on my behind three days later.”
-
“Major fluctuations in weight gain and loss are detrimental to your health and embarrassing to explain to your friends and family.”
-
“Nobody, but nobody, is as fat as she thinks she is.”
-
“When women are excited about a date, they go immediately on a diet, because all women know they are hideously obese.”
-
“Britt ate lots of chocolate but never got fat — a sure sign of demonic possession ...”
-
“You're not too fat; you're just in the wrong country.”
-
“It is eleven Year since I have seen my Figure in a Glass. The last Refflection I saw there was so disagreable, I resolv'd to spare my selfe such mortifications for the Future ...”
-
“... it's perfectly possible to hate one's fat and to love one's body at the same time.”
-
“How do you think it would feel to be obliged to ask for a seat-belt extender on an airplane? For the unfashionably bulgy, life is a series of small humiliations.”
-
“My weight is always perfect for my height — which varies.”
-
“We are rich earthy cooks / both of us and the flesh we are working / off was put on with grave pleasure.”
-
“Whenever women have made any social gains, whether it's being accepted as athletes or moving into the professions, it's going to be contradicted with an image of woman as small, diminished, reduced, brought back to a childish body. The result is that a lot of extraordinary power is going to be diverted into making oneself smaller than one is meant to be.”
-
“They were agreed that to grow fat was the unpardonable sin against all the good in life, from ethics to morals to esthetics and back again.”
-
“As she is a woman, and as she is an American, she was dieting.”
-
“Why, there is Mrs. Natty B. Slymm, who is beautifully thin, and she eats twice as much as you do, and does not gain an ounce. You know positively that eating has nothing to do with it, for one time you dieted, didn't eat a thing but what the doctor ordered, besides your regular meals, and you actually gained.”
-
“A woman has all too much substance in a man's eyes at the best of times. That is why men like women to be slim. Her lack of flesh negates her. The less of her there is, the less notice he need take of her. The more like a male she appears to be, the safer he feels.”
-
“... two powerful, opposing forces — one seducing people to eat and the other telling them they are failures if they do — create heartache everywhere.”
-
“She belonged to a generation of women who had been well fed on meat and potatoes and some of their bodies could not forget this.”
-
“... when my friend Pammy was dying at the age of 37 we went shopping at Macy's. She was in a wheelchair, with a wig and three weeks to live. I tried on a short dress and came out to model it for Pammy. I asked if she thought it made me look big in the thighs, and she said, so kindly, 'Annie? You just don't have that kind of time.' I live by this story.”
-
“... she does not have an ounce of fat on her body. I completely hate that in a person. I consider it an act of aggression against the rest of us mothers who forgot to start working out after we had our kids.”
-
“The awful thing about being fat is you can't get away from it. Everywhere you go, there it is; all round you; hanging and swinging, yards and yards of it, under your arms, everywhere. And everyone else is so thin.”
-
“A diet counselor once told me that all overweight people are angry with their mothers and channel their frustrations into overeating. So I guess that means all thin people are happy, calm, and have resolved their Oedipal entanglements.”
-
“... she managed to grow stouter every day with a persistence and fortitude which denoted the reserved forces of her nature ...”
-
“[On being overweight:] If I tried to haul ass, I would have to make two trips.”
-
“I'm tired of being regarded as less-than because of my more-than size. When are we going to understand that fat is an adjective, not an epithet?”
-
“... I am also five three and in the neighborhood of one thirty. It is a neighborhood I would like to get out of ...”
-
“Give me a dozen such heart-breaks, if that would help me to lose a couple of pounds!”
-
“A waist is a terrible thing to mind.”
-
“To me thin people never had any meaningful problems.”
-
“When going on a date with someone they met online, the number-one fear that straight women have is going on a date with a serial killer. The number-one fear straight men have is going on a date with a fat woman. That says everything.”
-
“If no one saw — it didn't count. It's only when you eat in front of strangers or people that make you feel guilty that food is really fattening.”
-
“Statistically, skinny women die younger than fat women. Why? Because fat women are killing them.”
-
“I have a friend who actually told me that she'd rather be dead than be fat. This is a woman who, if I order a sandwich at lunch, she'll order a salad. If I order a salad, she'll order half a cantaloupe. If I order half a cantaloupe, she'll order a cup of coffee. This bizarre contest continues until she's down to sucking on a mint-flavored toothpick. At this rate, her preference for dying over being fat could be a reality sooner than she thinks.”
-
“Little snax / Bigger slax.”
-
“Dieters are wonderful consumers, purchasing food and weight-loss products in an endless cycle.”
-
“Being fat is the absolute nadir of the misfit. You're a misfit because nothing fits. You don't fit in. You're not fit. You're fat. Fat doesn't have the poetic cachet of alcohol, the whiff of danger in the drug of choice. You're just fat. Being fat is so un-American, so unattractive, unerotic, unfashionable, undisciplined, unthinkable, uncool. It makes you invisible. It makes you conspicuous.”
-
“What finally prompted me to lose weight was a view of myself in a hairdresser's full-length mirror when I was seated and wearing one of the salon's floral print robes and realized that I looked like a slipcovered club chair.”
-
“There's no such thing as excess eating, only inadequate activity.”
-
“Honey, that Totie Fields is one well-fed white woman. When that gal sits around the house, she sits around the house!”
-
“... the illusion never really dissipates that you can lose twenty pounds in one night by cutting out dinner.”
-
“Recipe for a long life: Be careful not to exceed the feed limit.”
-
“Ultimately, of course, there is no excuse for being fat in this culture. It's the one last prejudice we allow ourselves, the final frontier of acceptable segregation. Our political correctness is positively Californian when it comes to race, creed, origin, and orientation. But we still condemn ourselves and others for this last intolerable offense in an annoyingly tolerant society.”
-
“... like most heavy people, she had long ago stopped expecting anything of her clothes.”
-
“But if one doesn't have a character like Abraham Lincoln or Joan of Arc, a diet simply disintegrates into eating exactly what you want to eat, but with a bad conscience.”
-
“... fear and loathing of fat are real, and American attitudes about fat may be more dangerous to public health than obesity itself.”
-
“... fashion has always been a little slow in accommodating large women. ... We're not asking for philanthropy here. Wake up, we're fat, we like nice clothes, and we've got cash.”
-
“Life is not a dress size.”
-
“Fat people aren't really jolly. Sometimes we act that way so you will leave us alone. We pay a price for this. But at least we get to hang on to what self-respect we smuggled out of grade school and adolescence.”
-
“Fat is the last preserve for unexamined bigotry.”
-
“All fat people are 'outed' by their appearance.”
-
“In my family, my fat family, none of us ever say the word 'fat.' 'Fat' is the word you hear shouted on the playground or in the street — it's never allowed over the threshold of the house. My mum won't have that filth in her house. At home together, we are safe. ... There will be no harm to our feelings here because we never acknowledge fat exists. We never refer to our size. We are the elephants in the room.”
-
“... I am fully aware of what the word 'fat' means ... It's a swear word. It's a weapon. It's a sociological subspecies. It's an accusation, dismissal, and rejection.”
-
“We know that every woman wants to be thin. Our images of womanhood are almost synonymous with thinness.”
-
“Fat is a feminist issue.”
-
“... we dig our graves with our teeth.”
-
“The narrower their lives, the wider their hips.”
-
“... the fear of fat works ... because it's being manipulated in us to enforce class divisions, racisms, womyn-hatred. And we give it the room to work because it's so close to us, it's our own bodies, that we don't see it as coming from outside ourselves, we don't name it for the weapon it is.”
-
“... I got a flash of ... what it means, now, 'you can't be too rich or too thin.' How well it works, will keep on working, because the vast majority of women will never be thin. Thin enough. How well the hope of class mobility keeps every mother dieting, and handing the diets down to her daughter, hoping the daughter may do even better. When you combine this with the fact that many non-white peoples tend to be heavier than white folks, dieting becomes a tool not only in enforcing class but in encouraging assimilation.”
-
“This is a business meal. The calories do not count. I am mentally labeling these as 'business calories' so my body will know they were eaten in the line of duty and will process them differently.”
-
“Wake me up when I'm a size 5.”
-
“There are only two secrets to a slimmer shape ... High heels and shoulder pads!”
-
“She's got this real funny idea about a diet: you don't get fat if no one sees you eating.”
-
“To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.”
-
“The older you get, the harder it is to lose weight, because your body has made friends with your fat.”
-
“You do know when people say 'chic,' they mean thin.”
-
“It's no wonder we're all so neurotic about weight. What chance do we have to grow up with a healthy attitude toward it when the first thing that happens when we enter the world is that we're weighed? And then spanked.”
-
“... just because people are fat, it doesn't mean they are well fed. The cheapest foods are the fattening ones, not the most nourishing.”
-
“Fat overflowed not only from her jowl to her neck, but from her ankles to her shoes. She looked like a pudding that had risen too high and run down the sides of the dish.”
-
“His body's taken on the weight his mind still refuses to accept.”
-
“I hate skinny women, especially when they say things like 'Sometimes I forget to eat.' Now, I've forgotten my mother's maiden name, and my keys, but you've got to be a special kind of stupid to forget to eat!”
-
“... women who seemed capable of only limited mental tasks in most situations could retain information regarding other people's weight for years, sometimes decades. Unlike genuine idiots savants, they couldn't tell you that December 13, 1972, had fallen on a Wednesday. But they could often tell you, within a pound or two, how much you'd weighed that week.”
-
“I break all the rules and wear everything. Ruffles, ostrich feathers, fox coats. You look fat in fox anyway, so if you start fat, you only look a little fatter.”