Corsets Quotes

I'm taller than most actresses, so most corsets tend to be too short in the body. ~ Michelle Dockery

Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, the drowsy well-fed girls lounging in the shade were no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth of cork rocks and cardboard trees. ~ Joan Lindsay

I brought color to bridal. There was one whole season of blush. If you think about the bareness, the illusion (fabric), the corsets that I did in bridal, they were trends in ready-to-wear, too. ~ Vera Wang

The Marquis looked very grave and replied, 'I knew, of course, the minute whalebone corsets went out of fashion that things were coming to a pretty pass. ~ Sally Gardner

I can't breathe. I'm joing the Rational Dress Society the very moment we are back in London,and I fully intend to leave their pamphlets under Mother's pillow and tucked into her corsets. ~ Alyxandra Harvey

Love was nothing but a lie people told themselves.
But lust?
Lust was real, and he was feeling it. Feeling it to his core. As he held her to him, his blood pounded with the fiercest, most primal kind of need. One that spoke of possession and claiming and mine.
She made him wild.
Surely it was simply because he'd gone so long without female company. Madeline wasn't even his usual sort. Given his choice, he would have said he favored a bonny Scots lass with fiery hair and a knowing gleam in her eye. Not a shy, proper English gentlewoman just learning the taste of her first kiss.
But beneath the shyness and reserve, she possessed a natural, earthy sensuality. He couldn't help but think of what that might mean in bed- when all the rules and corsets were shed, and the dark freed her from propriety. ~ Tessa Dare

Corsets were not designed for battling monsters. ~ Jessica Cluess

I hate wearing anything tight. A corset is my idea of torture. ~ Raquel Zimmermann

His trees were now hung all over with scrawled pieces of paper and bits of cardboard with maxims from Seneca and Shaftesbury, and with various objects; clusters of feathers, church candles, crowns of leaves, women's corsets, pistols, scales, tied to each other in certain order. The Ombrosians used to spend hours trying to guess what those symbols meant: nobles, Pope, virtue, war? I think some of them had no meaning at all but just served to jog his memory and make him realize that even the most uncommon ideas could be right. ~ Italo Calvino

I am used to wearing corsets. Even when I was first starting out it was either Shakespeare or Chekov. Everything that I was doing involved corsets. I guess I am just not destined to breathe that deeply. ~ Kate Beckinsale

I am a pig! I love to eat! i will eat anything! If you put it front of me, I will put it in my mouth, even if it doesn't taste good! And I can't stop eating until all the food is gone. It's probably one of the contributing factors as to why I became a drag queen. I can eat whatever I want, because I can just strap myself into a corset! ~ Manila Luzon

With corsets, it's interesting when you put them on, realizing that's what women actually wore. They're just so constricting. ~ Lily James

I can't always be making 'British films.' Why should we be making films about corsets and horses and girls learning to drive when Americans send over an event movie and make five or 10 million? ~ Noel Clarke

How it irks me to have to take her hand, allow her to pull my dress over my head, undo my corsets and strip them off my, and have her see my blue veined swollen flesh and the hairy triangle that still proclaims with lunatic insistence a non-existent womanhood. ~ Margaret Laurence

I'd heard you were dead."
"I heard you wear a red lace corset," I said matter-of-factly. "But I don't believe every bit of nonsense that gets rumored about. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph ~ Allen Ginsberg

[Dessie's] shop was a unique institution in Salinas. It was a woman's world. Here all the rules, and the fears that created the iron rules, went down. The door was closed to men. It was a sanctuary where women could be themselves- smelly, wanton, mystic, conceited, truthful, and interested. The whalebone corsets came off at Dessie's, the sacred corsets that moulded and warped woman-flesh into goddess-flesh. At Dessie's they were women who went to the toilet and overate and scratched and farted. And from this freedom came laughter, roars of laughter. ~ John Steinbeck

Cowboy Rodeo was a very simple man. He liked his life simple. He liked his ranch full of animals, he liked the breeze across the plains, and he liked when the sun rose and set. He liked strong, cold whiskey and the stars at night.
Cowboy Rodeo realized at that moment he also really, really liked corsets and black pencil skirts that showed off the curve of the hip. ~ Shannon Noelle Long

When women take off their corsets and heighten their skirts it always means high inflation and low morals. ~ James Laver

A rich woman seems to have all her banknotes about her, guarding her virtue, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset. ~ Gustave Flaubert

With people in corsets you need, an hour and a half in you have to give somebody something, you have to have those trays with a little bit of fruit going around or something because you get that blood sugar [dropping] thing, so it's curious because that's in your mind at the same time as you're about to say, 'I think it's about the humanity and the depth of feeling and we need to feel [Cinderella] soul expand and by the way, more cheese for the people in the back.' ~ Kenneth Branagh

I'd love to be in a 1910s film - the era between the corsets and losing the corsets. ~ Vanessa Paradis

Gavin, I never thought you'd be the irrational one in this relationship, but I'm happy to report that you've just thoroughly shocked me."
He rolled to his side to lean on his arm, keeping my hand resting on his chest, buried underneath his shirt. "I know. My timing is impeccable." He smirked, letting his hungry gaze drift over my body. "But I'm sorry, love. I cannot take seeing you all tucked up in this sexy corset anymore. The ties are so tight, they're just begging me to undo them." His fingers trailed over the top of my chest and down over the corset's binding, tugging at the edges of the lace as he went. "Forcefully," he winked. ~ Rachael Wade

Even some rock star girls, which I didn't really know her name. I will probably find out and probably get slaughtered for not knowing her name, but she brought some of her clothes that she used to wear on stage. I wore one of the corsets and stuff. I don't know why I'm blanking. It was not Pat Benatar. It's like Debbie Gibson, Pat Benatar, Joan Jett, I know those girls. ~ Julianne Hough

If I had to model clothes in a time period other than the 21st century, I think I'd like to model way back when they just wore skin loincloths. That would be best suited for me - better than corsets. I'm quite claustrophobic. ~ Lara Stone

Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicolored lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to maintain their social status, then collapsed in exhaustion once they got home, abandoning all hope of seduction in favor of clothes that were loose and shapeless. ~ Michel Houellebecq

Corsets were a challenge in 'Belle;' fake nails tripped me up in 'Blackbird.' Guess I'm not a mani type of girl! ~ Gugu Mbatha-Raw

You can celebrate the female form in comfort. We left corsets behind in the dark ages, so why bring them back now? ~ L'Wren Scott

Lefty had seen Desdemona undress many times, but usually as no more than a shadow and never in moonlight. She had never curled onto her back like this, lifting her feet to take off her shoes. He watched and, as she pulled down her skirt and lifted her tunic, was struck by how different his sister looked, in moonlight, in a lifeboat. She glowed. She gave off white light. He blinked behind his hands. The moonlight kept rising; it covered his neck, it reached his eyes until he understood: Desdemona was wearing a corset. That was the other thing she'd brought along: the white cloth enfolding her silkworm eggs was nothing other than Desdemona's wedding corset. She thought she'd never wear it, but here it was. Brassiere cups pointed up at the canvas roof. Whalebone slats squeezed her waist. The corset's skirt dropped garters attached to nothing because my grandmother owned no stockings. In the lifeboat, the corset absorbed all available moonlight, with the odd result that Desdemona's face, head, and arms disappeared. She looked like Winged Victory, tumbled on her back, being carted off to a conqueror's museum. All that was missing was the wings. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage. ~ Samuel Beckett

I should get a few ribs taken out, because I'll be in a corset for the rest of my life. ~ Helena Bonham Carter

I have loved corsets since I was small. When I was a child, my grandmother took me to an exhibition, and they had a corset on display. I loved the flesh color, the salmon satin, the lace. ~ Jean Paul Gaultier

She did not understand why women complicated their lives with corsets and petticoats, so she sewed herself a coarse cassock that she simply put over her and without further difficulties resolved the problem of dress, without taking away the feeling of being naked, which according to her lights was the only decent way to be when at home. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The early settlers amazed her
they had pluck, they led lives of sweaty drama. Theirs was a world of corsets and whipping posts and indentured servitude. People worked the land and died in ungainly ways. Modern life, in comparison, seemed a cinch. ~ Jennifer Vanderbes

Could it be that the atomic isolation of the husband and wife nucleus with an orbiting child or two is in fact a culturally imposed aberration for our species? As ill-suited to our evolved tendencies as corsets, chastity belts, and suits of armor? ... a distorted and distorting family structure inappropriate for our species? ~ Christopher Ryan

I have a terrible weakness for collecting snatches of other people's conversations, and occasionally I'm rewarded with unusual fragments of knowledge. My favorite of the day came from a large but shapely woman sitting nearby whom I learned was the owner of a local lingerie shop. 'Beh oui,' she said to her companion, waving her spoon for emphasis, 'il faut du temps pour la corsetterie.' You can't argue with that. I made a mental note not to rush things next time I was shopping for a corset, and leaned back to allow the waiter through with the next course. ~ Peter Mayle

Maybe my ma was sick of the corsets. ~ Jennifer Ellision

Pretty words," Brooke said, dropping her arms so they laid limply at her sides. "But even the prettiest song can lose its intended meaning if it is repeated constantly. ~ Heather C. Myers

Women's scars and rituals involved beauty (piercing ears and noses, binding feet, and wearing corsets); men's involved protecting women. In cultures in which physical strength is still the best way to protect women, as among the Dodos in Uganda, each time a man kills a man, he is awarded a ritual scar; the more scars, the more he is considered eligible. ~ Warren Farrell

Really I was open-minded about doing anything, but the one thing I didn't want to do was get myself into a corset, because I was worried I'd never get out again. ~ Emma Watson

Perhaps I won't marry then. Instead, you and I shall live as spinsters in a cottage by the sea. We'll burn our corsets, eat chocolate morning, noon and night and grow fat as hedgehogs. ~ Alyxandra Harvey

The Dieter's Daughter

Mom's got this taco guy's poem
taped to the fridge, some ode to celery,
which she is always eating.
The celery, I mean, not the poem
which talks about green angels
and fragile corsets. I don't get it,
but Mom says by the time she reads it
she forgets she's hungry. One stalk
for breakfast, along with half a grapefruit,
or a glass of aloe vera juice,
you know that stuff that comes from cactus,
and one stalk for lunch
with some protein drink
that tastes like dried placenta,
did you know that they put cow placenta
in make-up, face cream, stuff like that?
Yuck. Well, Mom says it's never too early
to wish you looked different,
which means I got to eat that crap too.
Mom says: your body is a temple,
not the place all good twinkies go to.
Mom says: that boys remember
girls that're slender.
Mom says that underneath all this fat
there's a whole new me,
one I'd really like if only I gave myself
the chance. Mom says: you are
what you eat, which is why she eats celery,
because she wants to be thin,
not green or stringy, of course--
am I talking too fast?--
but thin as paper
like the hearts we cut out
and send to ourselves,
don't tell anyone,
like the hearts of gold
melons we eat
down
to the bitter rind. ~ Anita Endrezze

Thanks to our cinctures and corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman. She is an anomaly, and Nature herself, obedient to the laws of heredity, aids us in complicating and enervating her. We carefully keep her in a state of nervous weakness and muscular inferiority, and in guarding her from fatigue, we take away from her possibilities of development. Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our women have nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be without grave moral and social disadvantages. ~ Paul Gauguin

She wants me to take what magic I have left and blot every memory of this evening from their minds. To make them forget so that they can carry on as before. There will always be Cecilys, Marthas, and Elizabeths of the world - those who cannot bear the burden of truth. They will drink their tea. Weigh their words. Wear hats against the sun. Squeeze their minds into corsets, lest some errant thought should escape and ruin the smooth illusion they hold of themselves and the world as they like it.
It is a luxury, this forgetting. No one will come to take away the things I wish I had not seen, the things I wish I did not know. I shall have to live with them.
I wrench away from her grip. "Why should I?"
I do it anyways. Once I am certain the girls are asleep, I creep into their rooms, one by one, and lay my hands across their furrowed brows, which wear the trouble of all they've witnessed. I watch while those brows ease into smooth, blank canvases beneath my fingers. It is a form of healing, and I am surprised by how much it heals me to do it. When the girls awake, they will remember as strange dream of magic and blood and curious creatures and perhaps a teacher they knew whose name will not spring to their lips. They might strain to remember it for a moment, but then they will tell themselves it was only a dream best forgotten.
I have done what Mrs. Nightwing said I should do. But I do not take all their memories from them. I leave them with one small token of ~ Libba Bray

No one wore high heels anymore. They were in the same category as corsets –a torturous invention of the past that had served to make men desire women and caused women nothing but sore feet and broken ankles. ~ Elin Peer

I can snap open corsets faster than bones." He held his knife up, his attention fixed on my chest. "Interested in a demonstration, fancy lady? Say the word and I'll show you what else I can do with such a fine figure."
Liza stiffened beside me. People often called women of supposedly questionable morals "fancy ladies." If he thought I'd blush and run off, he was sorely mistaken.
"Unfortunately, sir, I find I'm not terribly impressed." I casually slipped a scalpel from my wristlet clutch, enjoying the familiar feel of it. "You see, I also eviscerate bodies. But I don't bother with animals. I butcher humans. Would you care for a demonstration? ~ Kerri Maniscalco

They helped each other with their corsets. Aunt Docia pulled as hard as she could on Aunt Ruby's corset strings, and then Aunt Docia hung on to the foot of the bed while Aunt Ruby pulled on hers.
"Pull, Ruby, pull!" Aunt Docia said, breathless. "Pull harder." So Aunt Ruby braced her feet and pulled harder. Aunt Docia kept measuring her waist with her hands, and at last she gasped, "I guess that's the best you can do."
She said, "Caroline says Charles could span her waist with his hands, when they were married."
Caroline was Laura's Ma, and when she heard this Laura felt proud. ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder

The space program caused so much future-thinking in culture. People who couldn't go to the Moon were building space-fantasy chairs and corsets and hairdos and anything that they could put their hands on. ~ Aleksandra Mir

I'd love to slit my mother-in-law's corsets and watch her spread to death. ~ Phyllis Diller

Everything is important, but there is a weight to these big or expected things and then there is the logistics of them and it's trying to find, while you worry about for instance the ballroom scene, how do you get 500 people to go to the loo in corsets and don't cost you an hour and how do you remember while you're organizing all that to take a breath and say, 'Well the scene is about all of that and it's about [Prince] hand on the small of [Cinderella] back as well' and we need time to do that properly as well. ~ Kenneth Branagh

The one thing I've come to figure out is this equation where the more uncomfortable I am, the better I'm going to look. I'm like, "This one really hurts. I must look awesome!" The corsets are uncomfortable, but they are so flattering. No, my waist will never be that small. ~ Kristin Bauer Van Straten

I would love to do a period movie. I've always wanted to wear the corset, you know. It's a girl thing! ~ Kat Dennings

All of the women in that time and place, Thea had learned, were stuffed into muslin and starched cotton and forced to sit ramrod-straight and plait their hair or pull it back off their faces with fish oil. There were shoes that laced up with a hundred eyelets, and corsets that required a special hook to open. Women were all in it together back then, as opposed to now, when one woman's experience could differ so greatly from another's that you never knew who you were talking to. ~ Meg Wolitzer

Do you know that cats can't wear corsets? They can't stand! Not at all! They just fall over. I know because I tried! ~ Jean Paul Gaultier

I preach freedom of the mind through freedom of the body; women, for example - out of the prison of corsets. ~ Isadora Duncan

American whale oil lit the world. It was used in the production of soap, textiles, leather, paints, and varnishes, and it lubricated the tools and machines that drove the Industrial Revolution. The baleen cut from the mouths of whales shaped the course of feminine fashion by putting the hoop in hooped skirts and giving form to stomachtightening
and chest-crushing corsets. Spermaceti, the waxy substance from the heads of sperm whales, produced the brightest- and cleanest-burning candles the world has ever known, while ambergris, a byproduct of irritation in a sperm whale's bowel, gave perfumes great staying power and was worth its weight in gold. ~ Eric Jay Dolin

On corsets: I said, You have got to be kidding. I am an ape and yet I am still expected to squeeze myself into one of those damn things. ~ Helena Bonham Carter

What's really interesting is when you get a brand-new wave that has no connection to anything else. It always reflects society. The flappers would cut the dresses and make them looser, they smoked, their hair was short. It was a rebellion against the corset and the Edwardian era. ~ Annie Lennox

My most recent purchase was a black lace corset. ~ Lexa Doig

Oh, and I [Amy] may also have told him that I quite fancied Dr Smith [The Doctor]. Which in the 1780s was probably punishable by stoning or corsets. ~ James Goss

14 July 1942 - Jerusalem - ...A magnificent parcel, covered in tape and seals, arrived for me from India. Inside were two pairs of old fashioned corsets with bones and laces. They were sent by HRH The Duke of Gloucester. Nick and I had an argument as to how one should thank one of the Royal Family for a present of corsets. Whichever way we put it looked disrespectful. Finally we sent a telegram saying: 'Reinforcements received. Positions now held. Most grateful thanks. ~ Hermione Ranfurly

I'm drawn to intergenerational tension, and it must have been strong in the 1920s: I wondered how Louise's [Brooks] generation of flappers appeared to the women who came of age at the beginning of the century - wearing corsets, long skirts, and high collars. ~ Laura Moriarty

I think I've still got a bit of a sado-masochistic streak in me, because if I'm not going to be restricted by corsets and covered in lace, then I still wind up wearing an ape-mask over my face. I do wonder how I get myself in these situations! ~ Helena Bonham Carter

You go to the gym to make sure you have the stamina to breathe in the corsets. ~ Sondra Radvanovsky

Dearest Reece,
I know you think it improper, or at the very least imprudent, for us to write to one another, but I don't care.There are too many rules as it is and they would choke me if I let them. Between corsets and lessons and curtsies and etiquette, I am hardly myself, and that is how they want it. They would prefer we all dress and talk and think (or not think) alike, like paper dolls.
I do not wish to be a paper doll.
Surely you can see that I am stronger than that.I don't give a fig for the scandalbroth or the gossipmongers. Let us remove to Paris, where no one knows us to care and where they dine on scandal with eclairs every morning.
You will say again that it is impossible but I refuse to believe it. I know with every touch of your hand on mine, with every stolen kiss, that nothing is impossible.
Perhaps love isn't meant to be simple. Perhaps this is merely a test, such as Psyche went through to prove herself to Cupid. Would you have me count lentils, beloved?
And as you claim I have the most to lose, I pray you will let me decide for myself what it is I want and need.
Which is you.
Not silks or lobster soup in crystal bowls or diamonds around my neck.
Just you.
You say again and again that you love me.
Prove it. ~ Alyxandra Harvey

Michelle Dockery is Mary: There was one scene where I had a corset visible, so it was made for me. After we had filmed it, we removed all the details - flowers and ribbons - to make it a plain corset and then I could wear that as it was a perfect fit. I'm taller than most actresses, so most corsets tend to be to short in the body. ~ Jessica Fellowes