Minding the Body Quotes

“When you walk this earth on borrowed time, each day on the calendar is a beloved friend you know for only a short time.”
― Judith Hooper, Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul

“When I look, really look, at the people I see every day on the street, I see a jungle of bodies, a community of women and men growing every which way like lush plants, growing tall and short and slender and round, hairy and hairless, dark and pale and soft and hard and glorious. Do I look around at the multitudes and think all these people—all these people who are like me and not like me, who are various and different—are not loved or lovable? Lately, everyone’s body interests me, every body is desirable in some way. I see how muscles and skin shift with movement; I sense a cornucopia of flesh in the world. In the midst of it I am a little capacious and unruly.”
― Sallie Tisdale, Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul

“Sometimes I’m afraid the main reason I spend half of my life outdoors is simply because there aren’t any mirrors.”
― Pam Houston, Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul

“I am walking down the street in Manhattan, Fifth Avenue in the lower sixties, women with shopping bags on all sides. I realize with some horror that for the last fifteen blocks I have been counting how many women have better and how many women have worse figures than I do. Did I say fifteen blocks? I meant fifteen years.”
― Pam Houston, Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul

“We have a gift beyond measure, the daily bliss of being alive. Forced by our disease to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, like any woman who gives birth, we get to experience the sacredness of life.”
― Judith Hooper, Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul

“Even the ways we don’t eat are based in class. The middle class don’t eat in support groups. The poor can’t afford not to eat at all. The rich hire someone to not eat with them in private.”
― Sallie Tisdale, Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul