Hubert > Hubert's Quotes

“In my work, I see a lot of women who suffer from low self-esteem. They think they’re unattractive, but the way society today—” “I don’t think I’m unattractive,” she says. “That’s good. That’s great. It’s not something women are always aware of on a conscious level, though. So, I would like you to be open-minded to the possibility that perhaps, deep down, you might be feeling unattractive without being aware of it. And if that’s the case, you might feel there’s no point in even trying to look better.” “Yeah but, no. I don’t think I’m unattractive. And I don’t think it subconsciously either.”
― Amanda Filipacchi, The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty

“He was an old hand at the Camp now, his hollow countenance and the intensity of his averted gaze familiar to all who came and went around him. Some had carried to other camps a description of his lanky, quiet presence, had spoken of his strangeness, his regular, lone attendance before the chapel statue. He had made no friends, but in his duties was conscientious and persevering and reliable, known for such qualities to the officers who commanded him. He had dug latrines, metalled roads, adequately performed cookhouse duties, followed instructions as to the upkeep of equipment, and was the first to volunteer when volunteers were called for. That he bore his torment with fortitude was known to no one.”
― William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault

“I knew that somehow this loneliness was linked to all my other fears and worries and premonitions and to my sense, that fall, of the terrible fragility of everything around me.”
― Stephen Goodwin, Breaking Her Fall: A Father's Blind Rage Ignites a Powerful Literary Family Drama of Redemption

“...and in the deep, dreaming hours I am easily moved by the stories of the real men and women who have lived out their passions on a scale so much greater than my own. It is at night, with a book open and these noble ghosts rising from the page, that I believe most strongly in the grandeur of life and feel most alone.”
― Stephen Goodwin, Breaking Her Fall: A Father's Blind Rage Ignites a Powerful Literary Family Drama of Redemption

“Sensuality does not wear a watch but she always gets to the essential places on time. She is adventurous and not particularly quiet. She was reprimanded in grade school because she couldn’t sit still all day long. She needs to move. She thinks with her body. Even when she goes to the library to read Emily Dickinson or Emily Bronte, she starts reading out loud and swaying with the words, and before she can figure out what is happening, she is asked to leave. As you might expect, she is a disaster at office jobs.

Sensuality has exquisite skin and she appreciates it in others as well. There are other people whose skin is soft and clear and healthy but something about Sensuality’s skin announces that she is alive. When the sun bursts forth in May, Sensuality likes to take off her shirt and feel the sweet warmth of the sun’s rays brush across her shoulder. This is not intended as a provocative gesture but other people are, as usual, upset. Sensuality does not understand why everyone else is so disturbed by her. As a young girl, she was often scolded for going barefoot.

Sensuality likes to make love at the border where time and space change places. When she is considering a potential lover, she takes him to the ocean and watches. Does he dance with the waves? Does he tell her about the time he slept on the beach when he was seventeen and woke up in the middle of the night to look at the moon? Does he laugh and cry and notice how big the sky is?

It is spring now, and Sensuality is very much in love these days. Her new friend is very sweet. Climbing into bed the first time, he confessed he was a little intimidated about making love with her. Sensuality just laughed and said, ‘But we’ve been making love for days.”
― J. Ruth Gendler, The Book of Qualities: An Evocative Work of Poetic Psychology―Magical Personifications of Human Emotions

“Contentment has learned how to find out what she needs to know. Last year she went on a major housecleaning spree. First she stood on her head until all the extra facts fell out. Then she discarded about half her house. Now she knows where every thing comes from—who dyed the yarn dark green and who wove the rug and who built the loom, who made the willow chair, who planted the apricot trees. She made the turquoise mugs herself with clay she found in the hills beyond her house.

When Contentment is sad, she takes a mud bath or goes to the mountains until her lungs are clear. When she walks through an unfamiliar neighborhood, she always makes friends with the local cats.”
― J. Ruth Gendler, The Book of Qualities: An Evocative Work of Poetic Psychology―Magical Personifications of Human Emotions

“Who was I supposed to tell? What was I supposed to say? That kind of stuff -- it happens all the time." It did. A million and one times. Comments on butts, jokes about bra straps. ... These things were just folded into our everyday lives, part of walking and breathing and doing math homework and eating lunch. Boys taking, and girls laughing. Having to pretend to be on your phone as you walked home in the dark,”
― Claire Swinarski, What Happened to Rachel Riley?

“This is the part they leave out, in focused attempts at justice: that you will occasionally want to push it all aside and curl up for one big nap instead.”
― Claire Swinarski, What Happened to Rachel Riley?

“But why is it on the girls? Why is it just expected that we'll be the ones to say something and get all mad? Why can't we just depend on boys to not slap butts and snap bra straps?!”
― Claire Swinarski, What Happened to Rachel Riley?

“When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“Change is never easy for anyone. And yet we do not ever remain the same, do we? Every moment, every hour, of every day of our lives is a stumble from one variation of our existence to the next.
Constantly revolving, one can find it hard to adjust. Difficult to put one foot in front of the other without tripping over one's own well-polished shoes.
Deciphering whether the change was good, or better still, deciding that it must be good - or rather ignoring the unacceptableness - was a strength I possessed.”
― Eliza Knight, The Mayfair Bookshop

“Shown her how life could reward the places where you least exerted effort, while denying what you desired and worked so ardently toward most.”
― Kathy Wang, Family Trust

“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.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“I so desperately craved men's validation that I accepted it even when it came wrapped in disrespect.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“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.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“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.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“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.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“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.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“You thought you were a mind, but you're a body.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“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.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“I know that embracing anger means relinquishing that control, that assessment, that distance from myself, but I am desperate for control. I would rather hurt myself--metaphorically stab myself--than let anyone else hold the knife.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“I do remember that as a young girl I prayed for beauty. I'd lie in bed, squeeze my eyes shut, and concentrate so hard that I broke out in a sweat underneath the covers. I believed that for God to take you seriously, you had to make your mind as blank as possible and then focus on the expanding spots of light behind your eyelids and think only of the one thing you desperately wished for.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“No one likes an angry woman. She is the worst kind of villain: a witch, obnoxious and ugly and full of spite and bitterness. Shrill. I do anything to avoid that feeling, anything to stop myself from being that woman. I try to make anything resembling anger seem spunky and charming and sexy. I fold it into something small, tuck it away.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“The world celebrates and rewards women who are chosen by powerful men.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“Strip yourself naked so it seems like no one else can strip you down; hide nothing, so that no one can use your secrets to hurt you.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“Feminism is all about choice, I reminded the world, so stop trying to control me.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“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.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“I only wish I’d told her in high school how strong I thought she was. How I would have liked to have known her better.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“I shut my eyes tight. I felt a sudden urge to disappear. I imagined being able to breathe in so deeply that my body would dissolve into the air I’d sucked in, and then I'd no longer be in my body, in my physical self, in this car with S, or anywhere at all. "You are the
problem," I thought to myself. "Something is wrong with you. And if you were taken out of the equation, everything would be just fine.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“What is the power of my body? Is it ever my power?”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body