Ava Gardner Quotes

With women, the way they look... it's the core of their self-esteem.

I'm not homely enough to play the nerdy girl and not nearly pretty enough to play the pretty girl.

I feel fortunate that I'm not a beauty. I'm not a classic beauty. I feel it is harder for girls who are like that. There are fewer parts.

I hate being too pretty.

Even my mother told me: 'You are a handsome woman, but you're not pretty. Pretty girls don't have those big bones.'

When I was growing up, one or two girls were beautiful, but it was not an aspiration, right?

People see you as an object, not as a person, and they project a set of expectations onto you. People who don't have it think beauty is a blessing, but actually it sets you apart.

Women are blessed with lots and lots of extra ways to win or lose validation. If you're a woman, you'll be judged on your beauty and your wit and how often you smile. You'll be judged on how much hair you have in some places and not in others.

When people see me, I might come across as just eye candy.

Pretty That's what I am, I guess. I mean, people have been telling me that's what I am since I was two. Maybe younger. Pretty as a picture. (Who wants to be a cliché?) Pretty as an angel. (Can you see them?) Pretty as a butterfly. (But isn't that really just a glam bug?) Cliché, invisible, or insectlike, I grew up knowing I was pretty and believing everything good about me had to do with how I looked. The mirror was my best friend. Until it started telling me I wasn't really pretty enough.

That beautiful mild woman for whose sake There's many a one shall find out all heartache On finding that her voice is sweet and low Replied, 'To be born a woman is to know- Although they do not talk of it at school - That we must labor to be beautiful.

I am not a pretty girl. I don't want to be a pretty girl. No, I want to be more than a pretty girl.

What Rizzoli thought, staring at her own image, was that she hated Elizabeth Hurley for giving women false hope. The brutal truth was, there are some women who will never be beautiful, and Rizzoli was one of them.

Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don't match our own beliefs about how we should look.

Even if I weren't in Hollywood, I would feel pressure to look a certain way.

Women spend their lives trying to look good for men. So a woman who feels she's sending the right visual signals is pleased with herself.

The pressure is on the women to be particularly small, and then not only that, the whole package. It's extreme.

Beautiful actors are learning what beautiful actresses like Charlize Theron discovered a while ago - that they get taken more seriously when they trash the same beauty that got them taken seriously to begin with.

You get stared at the whole time. I first noticed that when I was about 13. I was very shy. Being considered beautiful, I always felt that people were waiting for something more. I imagined you were supposed to have an intellectual ability - and I'm making no claims here - proportional to your supposed good looks.

Not one person would admit that they didn't want me to wear a bikini because of their aesthetic preference - a preference that is shaped by our cultural perceptions of what is and isn't beautiful.

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

It's not my plan or whatever in my life to be a sex symbol. It never is. You are who you are, but you can't help what you look like. And when you do a film, like for me, it's just not about that. I would prefer to downplay it. I prefer to downplay the sex appeal.

I was essentially paid to perpetuate the myth that we are all, or should at least try to be, 17 and a size 2 forever.

I was lucky not to have been born pretty.

Americans like fat books and thin women.