Susan Orlean Quotes

I was raised in the '50s. I was taught by my father that how I looked was all that mattered, frankly.

I was raised as a tomboy with boys, and I never really feel like myself when I am really dolled up at premieres and showbiz events.

I think behind closed doors people behave differently no matter what period we're looking at, because people have to stand up straight in public but can slouch behind closed doors - can you imagine wearing those corsets?

When you're wearing a corset for a long period of time, things that were important to you hours before are no longer important, because doing them exhausts you.

At every party there are two kinds of people - those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

It was so kind of you to mention that I don't wear stays. What's the point? If you squeeze it in at one point, it only comes out at the other.

There's so much judgment geared toward young girls. People just expect so much from girls. Even physically and aesthetically, people expect us to always look right, to have a certain etiquette - to talk a certain way and act a certain way - and to know certain things. It's all different expectations, but there are always expectations.

Like the guy I was dating. White, liberal, educated. I went to meet his family and I think that they probably didn't know they had a problem with it until he walked in with me. And they definitely had issues. Mom had issues with it. Could not, didn't want to see her son. And I don't think she had anything against me. But it was about her son bringing me home. And I felt that for the first time. I was like, 'Wow, that's deep.' It's really simple: I don't fit their picture.

This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

I think there is still pressure to marry. I think there is still pressure to have children. If you're middle or upper class, those pressures exist at a later age now.

Girls throw away so much energy in this search for beauty and sexiness.

Today, women have access to the technological capacity to do anything to our bodies in the struggle for "beauty", but we have yet to evolve a mentality beyond the old rules, to let them imagine that this combat among women is not inevitable. Surgeons can now do anything. We have not yet reached the age in which we can defend ourselves with an unwillingness to have "anything" done. This is a dangerous time. New possibilities for women quickly become new obligations.

... Take another glass of wine, and excuse my mentioning that society as a body does not expect one to be so strictly conscientious in emptying one's glass, as to turn it bottom upwards with the rim on one's nose.

Like if you all were going to go out and one guy's like "you know what man I'm going to stay home I'm feeling kind of shitty," you go, "You faggot." That's what it means. It's about a guy wimping out, being a douchebag...it has nothing to do with your sexual orientation.

Now if you're not „hot”, you are expected to work on it until you are. It's like when you renovate a house and you're legally required to leave just one of the original walls standing. If you don't have a good body you have down to a neutral shape, then bolt on some breast implants, replace your teeth, dye you hair, and call yourself the Playmate of the Year. How do we survive this? How do we teach our daughters and our gay sons that they are good enough the way they are? We have to lead by example.

And then, going to high school, I saw how popular girls had to behave to get the boys. I knew I couldn't fit into that. So I decided to do the opposite. I refused to wear makeup, to have a hairstyle. I refused to shave. I had hairy armpits.

Generally speaking, the greater a woman's beauty, the greater her modesty.

Don't try to teach men how to do anything in public. They can learn in private; in public they have to know.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

If one had to worry about one's actions in respect of other people's ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.

I think a single woman's biggest problem is coping with the people who are trying to marry her off!

In great matters, men behave as they are expected to; in little ones, as they would naturally

People say when you're in love, you don't need etiquette. Well, you need it then more than anything. Or they say, "At home I can just be myself." What they mean is they can be their worst selves... They always mean they will save all their anxiety about how to behave for somebody like the head waiter of a restaurant, someone they'll never see again.

Men have a trick of coming up to what is expected of them, good or bad.