I said to my teacher, ‘I can’t be a singer because I’m not pretty enough, and I’m fat.’ And she looked at me and said, ‘Tell that to Nell Carter, babe.’ That changed my life forever!
BETH DITTOI was given baby doll toys myself, and they proved a stark reminder that my life was expected to revolve around childbearing – just as my mom’s had before me, and her mom’s had before her.
More Beth Ditto Quotes
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You know how people love to glamorize poverty? There’s nothing glamorous about it. But it did make me really creative. Those days, I was literally taking t-shirts in the day and sewing them back together to make dresses for the night.
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I knew that if I wanted to stop being a pushover I had to get comfortable with small rejections myself. That took some work, but because of it I can now say no to other people with a clear conscience.
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We weren’t idiots, but I didn’t have that access to academic feminism. I had to realize, on my own, that feminism is not just about how far ahead you can get in a job and it isn’t about not wearing makeup. It isn’t about not watching your waistline. I had to recreate the world entirely.
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Someone told me once that Lucinda Williams takes six years between albums, and that’s what stuck to me; it’s like, you really are a factory. You don’t do things to make them, on your own time.
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Instagram is a Roman arena of insults. Everyone is a lion, but it is fun.
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Why wear pants when you can wear a muumuu?
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I’m a great believer in karma and the vengeance that it serves up to those who are deliberately mean is generally enough for me.
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I was always being told off at school. The teachers would say: ‘Everyone’s talking, but you’re the one I can hear.
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Even talking, I’m super-loud. I could never have that kind of meek, little wispy whimsical lavender and lace voice. It comes from my body. There’s no way I can fight it.
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I can take care of a house, and some people I meet, I think, ‘You don’t even know how to make a bed.
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Sometimes love can mean letting go and loving each other from a distance. Maybe that’s what you’re feeling?
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A few years back, when my style was “punk grandma”, I picked up an amazing pair of sandals – orthopaedic ones, with really thick soles. I’ve given them away to a friend now, because these days my look is more “1980s substitute teacher gone wild.”
BETH DITTO -
Girls are taught to sing high and pretty, like Antony, not low and from the guts like Nina Simone. But we’re slowly trying to change that. There are so many things we’re not told growing up, and it’s our true feminist responsibility to take the truth to the people who need to hear it.
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I have no control over what people think of me but I have 100% control of what I think of myself.
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I don’t love the word luxury because it feels Bougy to me.
BETH DITTO







