"Step Away from the Mean Girls…
…and say bye-bye to feeling bad about your looks.
Are you ready to stop colluding with a culture that makes so many of us feel physically inadequate? Say goodbye to your inner critic, and take this pledge to be kinder to yourself and others.

This is a call to arms. A call to be gentle, to be forgiving, to be generous with yourself. The next time you look into the mirror, try to let go of the story line that says you're too fat or too sallow, too ashy or too old, your eyes are too small or your nose too big; just look into the mirror and see your face. When the criticism drops away, what you will see then is just you, without judgment, and that is the first step toward transforming your experience of the world."
— Oprah Winfrey

"What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.
"
— Martha Graham

""You never come back, not all the way. Always, there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier, thin as the glass of a mirror. You never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and one in another, where everything is upside down and backwards and sad.""
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"Men always makes gods in their own image."
— Xenophanes

"'Right. I look fine. Except I don't,' said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. To that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had a lipstick or a woman's magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to Kiki's knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies-- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"You actually cannot sell the idea of freedom, democracy, diversity, as if it were a brand attribute and not reality -- not at the same time as you're bombing people, you can't."
— Naomi Klein

". . .sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that?
“Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

"She had a wattle and an enormous middle-aged ass that challenged all chairs."
— Junot Diaz

"Rushing toward her are all the letters of the alphabet. Each one moves in its own way, X cartwheeling over and over, C hopping forward, M and N marching stiff-legged and resolute."
— Myla Goldberg (Bee Season)

"Everybody sees me as this sullen and insecure little thing. Those are just the sides of me that I feel necessary to show because no one else seems to be showing them."
— Fiona Apple

"I've gone through stages where I hate my body so much that I won't even wear shorts and a bra in my house because if I pass a mirror, that's the end of my day."
— Fiona Apple

"All the heroes had crew cuts, platinum-blond wives and drove Corvettes. The media was devoted to this cult of innocence."
— Rinker Buck (Flight of Passage: A Memoir)

"The photograph, then, becomes a representation of a representation of a disease that represents. In other words, in order to produce the most perfect images of hysteria, the hysteric – a woman whose illness simulates the symptoms of other diseases – was transformed, through hypnosis, into an artificial hysteric who perfectly simulated the simulations of hysteria. The medical photograph becomes a copy of a copy of a copy, a representation so far removed from the original that all duplicitous traits, were easily erased, leaving the deranged and chaotic nature of the original far behind. The photograph succeeded in turning the hysteric into a wholly artificial being, literally a flat, framed, unmoving image."
— Asti Hustvedt (The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France)

"The truth is that loving oneself-and one's body-is a discipline all its own. It means challenging the images that the fashion industry has foisted on us. It means ignoring the voices that tell us that being healthy is a distant second to being thin."
— Anne Ream (Chicago Tribune,2007)

"She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance."
— Milan Kundera (Laughable Loves)

"She was kahuna, creating more life around her than was actually there, heightening the momentousness of each living thing by simply gazing upon it."
— Kiana Davenport (Shark Dialogues)

"I have spent too much time with my eye glued to the viewfinder and ended up missing both the image of the mind and that on film."
— Doug Peacock (Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness)