Models From England

"Women and girls have always faced hurdles. But that's never stopped us. We've sacrificed, fought, campaigned, succeeded, been knocked back, and succeeded again. In a race for justice, we've leapt over countless obstacles to win our rights."

"Here's what I think. Feminism is not here to dictate to you. It's not prescriptive, it's not dogmatic. All we are here to do is give you a choice.” “We want to empower women to do exactly what they want, to be true to themselves, to have the opportunities to develop. Women should feel free. There is no typical feminist, there is nothing anywhere that says you have to meet a certain [set of] criteria."

"Happier, healthier, more successful children? Being able to take proper paternity leave and see your baby? Being able to talk to someone if you're feeling shit? Actually getting to be yourself? Getting asked out by a woman? Better sex? A marriage that is a true partnership? More diverse and interesting perspectives in art, culture, business, and politics? Getting to crowdsource all the innovation and genius in the world, not just half of it? A highly increased number of safe, confident, and fulfilled people on the planet, particularly women? World peace? Seriously. World peace!"

"Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong."

"[Feminism]'s not about us convincing you that gender equality is worth engaging in only because there might be something in it for you, or in it for your sister or your mother. The question is, what's in it for humans?"

"Empathy and the ability to use your imagination should have no limits."

"It just always reveals to me how many misconceptions and what a misunderstanding there is about what feminism is. Feminism is about giving women choice. Feminism is not a stick with which to beat other women with. It’s about freedom, it’s about liberation, it’s about equality. I really don’t know what my tits have to do with it. It’s very confusing."

"I think I'm actually in denial that I'm famous, it only sinks in when people crowd in the streets. My friends treat me like a regular person, which is what I wanted."

"It was unbelievable seeing me as an action figure! In a few months, toddlers all around the country will be biting my head off!"

"In Cancún, I felt like I had walked into an American teen movie."

"I can't wait to be able to drive, but it's hard. Good driving doesn't really run in my family genes. My mother is possibly the worst driver ever."

"In 1997, Hillary Clinton made a famous speech in Beijing about women’s rights. Sadly many of the things she wanted to change are still true today. But what stood out for me the most was that less than 30 per cent of the audience were male. How can we effect change in the world when only half of it is invited or feel welcome to participate in the conversation? Men — I would like to take this opportunity to extend your formal invitation. Gender equality is your issue too."

"We don’t often talk about men being imprisoned by gender stereotypes, but I can see that that they are, and that when they are free, things will change for women as a natural consequence. If men don’t have to be aggressive in order to be accepted, women won’t feel compelled to be submissive. If men don’t have to control, women won’t have to be controlled. Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong… It is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum instead of two sets of opposing ideals. If we stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by who we are — we can all be freer and this is what HeForShe is about. It’s about freedom. I want men to take up this mantle. So that their daughters, sisters and mothers can be free from prejudice but also so that their sons have permission to be vulnerable and human too — reclaim those parts of themselves they abandoned and in doing so be a more true and complete version of themselves."

"You might be thinking who is this Harry Potter girl? And what is she doing speaking at the UN. And it’s a really good question. I've been asking myself the same thing. All I know is that I care about this problem. And I want to make it better. And having seen what I’ve seen — and given the chance — I feel it is my responsibility to say something. Statesman Edmund Burke said: “All that is needed for the forces of evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing.” In my nervousness for this speech and in my moments of doubt I’ve told myself firmly — if not me, who, if not now, when. If you have similar doubts when opportunities are presented to you I hope that those words might be helpful."

"I haven't been like, "Is there a sword in that movie? All right, I'll do it!""

"At the age of ninety, it has finally been explained to me that I am not really homosexual, I'm transgender. I now accept that. I no longer see myself as homosexual, though it is a word I have used to describe myself and which others have understandably used to describe me. I don't actually see myself as a man though, of course, I know I'm not physically a woman. The only thing in my life I have wanted and didn't get was to be a woman. [...] I don't dress like a woman ... I think my body is too like a man's body to have lived as a woman with any kind of success. I refer to myself as homosexual without thinking because of how I have lived my life."

"A pinch of notoriety will do."

"I suppose when I was a child, when I lived almost entirely in a dream world, I suppose I thought of myself as a woman, but later on you realise you have to live in the real world and that you are not. You are only in some senses effeminate or feminine, and you must make this compromise, you must learn to live in a world where statistically you are a man, whatever you may think about yourself. I didn't want to become anything. Once I'd accepted the world, all I wanted was that the world should understand what kind of person I was."

"I have come to think that both sex and politics are a mistake and that any attempt to establish a connection between the two is the greatest error of all."

"Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it."

"It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile, Be yourself no matter what they say"

"The people of Northern Ireland are ruled by a regime that is less concerned with morality than with religious doctrine. Their sectarianism is so divisive that, if you say you are an atheist, they ask, 'But is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you do not believe?'"

"If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family."

"'You talk for talking’s sake,' she hissed. I asked if that was bad. 'I mean it,' the girl replied. 'You talk for talking’s sake.' I had heard her the first time and had understood the words but not the contempt with which they were charged. 'Would you be equally annoyed,' I asked, 'if I danced for dancing’s sake? […] I should have said, 'Would you hate me if I lived for living’s sake?' This would have been the total question — the one to which a full reply could have saved the world."

"My fingers will not type the words "her money became a burden to her" but I do think that her wealth was like a lazy servant — better than nothing but a source of unremitting annoyance because it never filled her most urgent needs."

"Bit by bit, I was becoming the almost acceptable face of homosexuality."

"We think we write definitively of those parts of our nature that are dead and therefore beyond change, but that which writes is still changing — still in doubt. Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry."

"An autobiography is obituary in serial form with the last installment missing."

"Mass-murderers are simply people who have had ENOUGH."

"It would be impossible to get through the kind of life that I have known without accumulating a vast unused stockpile of rage. Retaliation, though, was a luxury I could never afford. On the physical level I was too feeble. On any other I was not rich enough. I never dared to be rude to anyone. I never knew that I might not need him later. Long after fantasies of sexual excess had ceased to torment me, my imagination was inflamed by lurid day-dreams of having my revenge on the world."

"To minimize my guilt at going to the pictures — to call this wanton pursuit of an effete pleasure by another name — I needed movie companions as drunkards need drinking partners. If I entered a cinema alone, God might plunge his arm through the roof of the auditorium booming in a stereophonic voice, "And you, Crisp, what are you doing here?" I would never have dared reply, "I’m just enjoying myself, Lord." I remembered too well what happened to Mr and Mrs Adam. A commissionaire with a flaming sword came and asked them to leave."

"To read a novel or see a play was to drink life through a straw — to smoke it through a filter-tip. If we were not afraid of blackening our teeth or riddling our lungs with cancer — if we were a dauntless race of men with strong digestions — we would be able to devour life without the aid of these over-civilized devices."

"I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information."

"He explained to me that he wanted a simple boy-meets-girl story with lyrics. This I felt was quite beyond my capabilities. I did not know any boys who met girls."

"Another friend began to say, "Well, Quentin has a problem of adjusting himself to society and he..." This sentence was never finished. The ballet teacher expostulated, "I don't agree. Quentin does exactly as he pleases. The rest of us have to adapt ourselves to him.""

"Many [hooligans] discover to their shame that they have scruples; they have roots and, greatest disadvantage of all, they have hope. The fathers superior of the order do not try to influence their children in Satan; they merely shake their heads in sorrow. They know that the apostate must work out his own damnation."

"Even hooligans marry, though they know that marriage is for a little while. It is alimony that is for ever."

"The low dive had set a standard that only middle-aged hooligans could remember and to which they looked back as Mrs Lot at Sodom."

"The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, "I wish you hadn’t made every line funny. It’s so depressing.""

"I now know that if you describe things as better as they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you are called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you are called a satirist."

"I became one of the stately homos of England."

"Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbours."

"I found that I had become so spinsterish that I was made neurotic not only by my life of domesticity but by the slightest derangement of my room. I would burst into a fit of weeping if the kettle was not facing due east."

"There are girls who do not like real life... Some of these girls are innocent enough to think that these unreal friendships [with homosexuals] will lead to true love — a kind of sexual intercourse that will happen to them without their having to take too horribly much notice. Even those who are sufficiently sophisticated to know that this will not be so persist in these relationships. They provide an opportunity to lavish emotion on a pseudo-man without paying the price that in heterosexual circumstances would be inevitable."

"The young always have the same problem — how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this problem by defying their elders and copying each other."

"When stripped, I looked less like "Il David" than a plucked chicken that died of myxomatosis."

"Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the excitements of touching or seeing a man but the excitement of being Man."

"Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing."

"If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being."

"Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave."