In all the years I’ve been a therapist, I’ve yet to meet one girl who likes her body. Mary Pipher

If I was going to be a woman, I would want to be as beautiful as possible. And they said to me, ‘Uh, that’s as beautiful as we can get you.’ And I went home and started crying to my wife, and I said, ‘I have to make this picture.’ And she said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Because I think I’m an interesting woman when I look at myself on screen, and I know that if I met myself at a party, I would never talk to that character because she doesn’t fulfill, physically, the demands that we’re brought up to think that women have to have in order for us to ask them out.’ She says, ‘What are you saying?’ and I said, ‘There’s too many interesting women I have not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.’ It was not what it felt like to be a woman. It was what it felt like to be someone that people didn’t respect, for the wrong reasons. I know it’s a comedy. But comedy’s a serious business. Dustin Hoffman

Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful. Germaine Greer

From the newsstands a dozen models smiled up at her from a dozen magazine covers, smiled in thin-faced, high-cheekboned agreement to Kessa’s new discovery. They knew the secret too. They knew thin was good, thin was strong; thin was safe. Steven Levenkron

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

Our culture is obsessed with perfection, especially when it comes to the way women look. The parameters of acceptability as far as physical appearance go are so limiting that only a handful of women actually fall into this category. And the rest of us are left to either squeeze ourselves into molds that don’t fit, hating ourselves all the while, or we just give up entirely. Yancy Lael

[Eating disorders] are a wonderful tool for helping you reject others before they can reject you. Example: You’re at a party. The popular girls are there. You know you can never be as cool as they are, but when one of the pops a potato chip into her mouth or chooses real Coke over Diet, for that moment you are better. Stacy Pershall

Who wants to recover? It took me years to get that tiny. I wasn’t sick; I was strong. Laurie Halse Anderson

I always felt that anorexia was the form of breakdown most readily available to adolescent girls. Kate Beckinsale

Eating disorders are like a gun that’s formed by genetics, loaded by a culture and family ideals, and triggered by unbearable distress. Aimee Liu

Looking to biology to explain the low prevalence of eating disorders among men is like looking to genetics to explain why nonsmokers do not get lung cancer as often as smokers. Susan Bordo

We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need. Marya Hornbacher

We clean our plates, yet we’re still famished—starving for something other than food. Kate Wicker

Most women in our culture, then, are disordered when it comes to issues of self-worth, self-entitlement, self-nourishment, and comfort with their own bodies; eating disorders, far from being ‘bizarre’ and anomalous, are utterly continuous with a dominant element of the experience of being female in this culture. Susan Bordo

We are the girls with anxiety disorders, filled appointment books, five-year plans. We take ourselves very, very seriously. We are the peacemakers, the do-gooders, the givers, the savers. We are on time, overly prepared, well read, and witty, intellectually curious, always moving… We pride ourselves on getting as little sleep as possible and thrive on self-deprivation. We drink coffee, a lot of it. We are on birth control, Prozac, and multivitamins… We are relentless, judgmental with ourselves, and forgiving to others. We never want to be as passive-aggressive as our mothers, never want to marry men as uninspired as our fathers… We are the daughters of the feminists who said, “You can be anything,” and we heard, “You have to be everything. Courtney Martin

And, what’s more, this ‘precious’ body, the very same that is hooted and honked at, demeaned both in daily life as well as in ever existing form of media, harrassed, molested, raped, and, if all that wasn’t enough, is forever poked and prodded and weighed and constantly wrong for eating too much, eating too little, a million details which all point to the solitary girl, to EVERY solitary girl, and say: Destroy yourself. Emilie Autumn

We can always find each other, we girls with secrets. Crystal Renn

I wish I had cancer. I will burn in hell for that, but it’s true. Laurie Halse Anderson

You know you’ve got problems when your head is hanging over the toilet, puking up your dinner, and what you’re thinking of is your dad. And how he thinks you’re not pretty. Teresa Lo

The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions. Marya Hornbacher

I am forever engaged in a silent battle in my head over whether or not to lift the fork to my mouth, and when I talk myself into doing so, I taste only shame. Jena Morrow

Girls developed eating disorders when our culture developed a standard of beauty that they couldn’t obtain by being healthy. When unnatural thinness became attractive, girls did unnatural things to be thin. Mary Pipher

To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself. Simone de Beauvoir

In my own mind, I am still a fat brunette from Toledo, and I always will be. Gloria Steinem

Even the models we see in magazines wish they could look like their own images. Cheri K. Erdman