Top 40 Emily Ratajkowski Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I have great childhood memories cow-tipping, going off and getting lost in the bog for hours, and coming home covered in dirt.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

2. “It’s like never hearing a Joy Division album or something. I’m finally watching Twin Peaks, and I’m so into it.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

3. “The way we are annoying them, being playful and having a good time with our body – it’s something very important for young women today to have that confidence. I think it’s actually celebrating women and their bodies.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

4. “You can go super American and get barbecue and beer and be like, ‘Whatever, I’m watching a football game.’ That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

5. “I think everyone has their awkward phases. Growing up isn’t easy for everyone.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

6. “You’re a woman, enjoy yourself, and believe that you can do things.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

7. “I basically had the same body when I was 14 and that was weird. But I think I had really good parents. I got really lucky.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

8. “For me, I want a president who is more than a symbol, someone who has ideas that I align with.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

9. “Pop music is great, but there’s a lot of BS about the attitude of guys being super-gangster – that’s why the whole thing is silly. It’s making fun of itself. That self-awareness is why people enjoy it. It’s refreshing.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

10. “The attention from the fashion world is something that I didn’t expect. I’ve shot with Bruce Weber and met Karl Lagerfeld. Having that kind of attention is really exciting.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

11. “The movie industry has been contacting me. I have been auditioning – that’s actually why I am in California. I was here meeting with studios and auditioning.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

12. “I grew up eating street tacos and burritos on the beach, so I like people who can eat and aren’t afraid to show it.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

13. “One thing that I’ve found is that people could relate and see different qualities in the video that they enjoyed. That wasn’t something I was necessarily expecting.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

14. “I met with Karl Lagerfeld, and if you have those kind of connections, that takes you into that world and puts you on that level.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

15. “I feel like every woman, and actually any guy who hasn’t played that many sports, you secretly wonder, like, ‘Would I be a pro athlete?’”

— Emily Ratajkowski

16. “I think of her and the other naked women who line the walls and fill the halls of museums, some so ancient the color has washed from their bodies and their marble heads have fallen off. It would be easy to mistake these displays for symbols of respect, for an honor. But what were their lives? And what were their names? no one remembers.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

17. “No one likes an angry woman. She is the worst kind of villain: a witch, obnoxious and ugly and full of spite and bitterness. Shrill. I do anything to avoid that feeling, anything to stop myself from being that woman. I try to make anything resembling anger seem spunky and charming and sexy. I fold it into something small, tuck it away.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

18. “I am newly married to my husband when he remarks casually, “There are so many beautiful women in the world.” I freeze when he says this. I know it is a perfectly acceptable and truthful thing to remark on, and yet I feel a familiar twist in my gut. “What?” he asks. He can feel the switch; he can sense the instant tension in my body. “I don’t know,” I reply. I press my face into his chest, ashamed of my reaction. “I don’t know why it hurts to hear you say that.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

19. “Apples and oranges, my therapist tells me. What if you’re not the same as other women, what if you’re an entirely different fruit? she asks gently. But everyone has a favorite fruit, I tell her. I feel a tear run down my cheek. Everyone prefers one over the other. That is how the world works; everything is ranked. One is always better than the other.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

20. “I will proclaim all of my mistakes and contradictions, for all the women who cannot do so, for all the women we’ve called muses without learning their names, whose silence we mistook for consent. I stood on their shoulders to get here.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

21. “Strip yourself naked so it seems like no one else can strip you down; hide nothing, so that no one can use your secrets to hurt you.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

22. “In my early twenties, it had never occurred to me that the women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to the men whose desire granted them that power in the first place. Those men were the ones in control, not the women the world fawned over. Facing the reality of the dynamics at play would have meant admitting how limited my power really was – how limited any woman’s power is when she survives and even succeeds in the world as a thing to be looked at.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

23. “On a good day, I’d call people sexist who condemned a woman for capitalizing on her body. On a bad day, I’d hate myself and my body, and every decision I’d made in my life seemed like a glaring mistake. Mostly, though, I knew I was a whole, complex person with thoughts and ideas and things I wanted to make and say. I wanted so desperately to prove them all wrong. I just hadn’t gotten the change yet.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

24. “I do remember that as a young girl I prayed for beauty. I’d lie in bed, squeeze my eyes shut, and concentrate so hard that I broke out in a sweat underneath the covers. I believed that for God to take you seriously, you had to make your mind as blank as possible and then focus on the expanding spots of light behind your eyelids and think only of the one thing you desperately wished for.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

25. “Beauty was a way for me to be special. When I was special, I felt my parents’ love for me the most.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

26. “It didn’t occur to me that what I wanted from S was the same thing that my mother craved from me: to have someone live in her pain with her.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

27. “Now I realize I wasn’t being a typical teenager. I just didn’t want to be looked at by my mother, because I knew that when she watched me she was often calculating: examining and comparing.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

28. “We learn to see things that are hidden, and things that aren’t there at all. We become particularly sensitive to the moods and emotions of others. We are nimble and excellent at shape-shifting. We oscillate between feeling special and feeling alone. We feel simultaneously capable of both saving and destroying those we love.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

29. “You thought you were a mind, but you’re a body.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

30. “I didn’t let myself be disappointed that she hadn’t said more. It was better this way, better that she couldn’t offer insight or comfort. The less I needed from her, the less opportunity she had to let me down.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

31. “I know that embracing anger means relinquishing that control, that assessment, that distance from myself, but I am desperate for control. I would rather hurt myself – metaphorically stab myself – than let anyone else hold the knife.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

32. “I so desperately craved men’s validation that I accepted it even when it came wrapped in disrespect. I was those girls in that room, waiting, trading my body and measuring my self-worth in a value system that revolves around men and their desire.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

33. “My mother seems to hold the way my beauty is affirmed by the world like a mirror, reflecting back to her a measure of her own worth.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

34. “I so desperately craved men’s validation that I accepted it even when it came wrapped in disrespect.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

35. “Thank you! What a joy life can be in this body.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

36. “I want to calculate my beauty to protect myself, to understand exactly how much power and lovability I have.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

37. “I read once that women are more likely than men to cry when they are angry. I know that women cry out of shame. We are afraid of our anger, embarrassed by the way that it transforms us. We cry to quell what we feel, even when it’s trying to tell us something, even when it has every right to exist.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

38. “Children who grow up in homes like mine, just them and their parents with no separation, physically or emotionally, become experts in a very particular type of seeing. We learn to see things that are hidden and things that aren’t there at all. We become particularly sensitive to the moods and emotions of others. We are nimble and excellent at shape-shifting. We oscillate between feeling special and feeling alone. We feel simultaneously capable of both saving and destroying those we love.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

39. “In these moments, I don’t hesitate. I rise to the challenge; I want to pass the test. I want to make it seem like there is no power dynamic at all, like I’m simply doing my job. I will reveal my body as naturally and uneventfully as I might do anything else. I look down at my body and it doesn’t feel like my own. It feels like something, but not me. They can look at me all they want, because they’re right; my body is just a tool.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

40. “I want to be the one in control of my body, even if that means denying it.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

41. “The world celebrates and rewards women who are chosen by powerful men.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

42. “I’ve always been drawn to overexposure. Making myself big gives me a sense of security. Be the loudest in the room, the most opinionated, the one in the most revealing dress. Do the most. Being big also means becoming a target. But by inviting people’s gaze and attention and therefore their attacks, I have a sense of more power, less vulnerability, since I’m the one putting myself out there.”

— Emily Ratajkowski

43. “How quickly they learned that the stuff in their heads was of less value than the shape of their bodies.”

— Emily Ratajkowski