Top 40 Jonathan Van Ness Quotes (2024 Update)

2. “You try being an eight-year-old violin-playing gymnastics-obsessed geode-collecting stamp connoisseur who has to have all those things with him in order to feel safe and nurtured.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

3. “My worst nightmare had been realized, and I was still here.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

4. “Our grief was leading us all towards Mexican food.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

5. “One thing I have come to notice in my life is that recovery for me has not been linear. It’s more two steps forward, three back, five forward, two back, so I’m always improving but there are setbacks within the improvement.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

6. “So I’m telling my story – the whole story – to show that some masterpieces start off a mess.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

7. “As scary as this can be I want you to know no matter how broken you feel, and how seemingly unlikely it is, we are never too broken to heal.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

8. “If I’d known then what I know now, I would have told my little baby self that being strong and masculine has everything to do with having the courage and audacity to be different. It’s such a better way to be a man – bold and courageous – than squashing it down and trying to fit into a very basic idea of how men are supposed to be. Not to mention that the concepts around masculinity are as tired as the day is long.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

9. “You know those plants that are always trying to find the light? Maybe they were planted in a location that didn’t necessarily facilitate growth, but inexplicably they make a circuitous route to not only survive but bloom into a beautiful plant. That was me – my whole life.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

10. “I just wanna be fit and have good blood pressure and feel good with my clothes off and I do. I love my body but I think that there’s always a part of me that wishes I looked more like Antoni or like an underwear model. But then again, I still really love to binge eat at McDonald’s at night, so... you know.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

11. “But just like joy and pain coexist, so can discomfort and humor. Which is why you gotta buckle up, buttercup, because I can go from comedy to tragedy in three seconds flat. And that’s not damaged or not normal.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

12. “Cheering on a corrupt institutional body that’s super problematic with money and opportunity but we all pretend like it’s an equal playing field and celebrate it – what’s more American than that?”

— Jonathan Van Ness

13. “Life is so much a daily exercise in learning to love yourself and forgive yourself, over and over.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

14. “Being normal is being completely unique, because nobody’s the same. Normal, honey? Who is she, anyway?”

— Jonathan Van Ness

15. “There was nobody to tell about that kind of shame and pain. So creating pockets of joy for myself was an art I learned early.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

16. “Joyful accomplishments exist next to painful memories. I found a lot of my healing when I realized that my suffering didn’t undo my joy.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

17. “Learning to parent yourself, with soothing compassionate love, forgiving yourself, and learning from all the decisions you made to get you to where you are – that’s the key to being fulfilled. Learning to be the dream parent cheerleader to yourself. It’s been in you the whole time. And no matter how down you get, you can always make a gorgeous recovery.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

18. “Joy can live beside sorrow.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

19. “But after nearly two years, still working as an assistant and having the goalposts for what I’d need to become a stylist constantly moving, I knew that I wasn’t going to make it there. It wasn’t worth giving up my well-being and working in a toxic and frequently abusive environment to make 20 percent from a clientele that I knew I would have to build myself.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

20. “Just because we mess up doesn’t mean all the lessons we learned are undone. Healing can be imperfect.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

21. “Joy can live beside sorrow. Life is messy, unpredictable, and seldom tied into neat little boxes.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

22. “Imperfection is beautiful. To anyone who has ever felt broken beyond repair, this is for you. If you’ve ever been excluded, or told you were not enough, know that you are enough, and beautifully complete.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

23. “Not to mention my grandparents’ generation grew up in the Depression and World War II and didn’t have the ability to teach what they did not know. Self-care, self-love, and nurturing yourself were all considered hogwash. Just eat a balanced diet of a bottle of wine a night, a protein, a carb, and a vegetable, push your feelings down, and get on with it.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

24. “I had spent the first half of my twenties fighting to find the will to process everything that I’d survived in my childhood and adolescence. Having done the hard work, I was now in a chapter in my life where I had the clarity to pursue my dreams and passion and find some actual success.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

25. “There’s a rhyme and reason behind my effervescent spirit, and no, I did not wake up like this. It took a lot of trauma and tears to become the person you see today.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

26. “It’s not gonna be pretty, but it’s my truth, and if I don’t share it, I won’t be able to help others who are struggs to func.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

27. “Fake it till you make it and make it look graceful.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

28. “Comparing ourselves to people on social media is as risky as using WebMD to diagnose yourself. You’ll end up way more stressed than before – just don’t even go there.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

29. “I hope culturally we can continue to normalize the idea that being a survivor is so much more common than anyone realizes and we all deserve to be heard, but more importantly are deserving of a recovery full of love, laughter, and light.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

30. “All I had to lose was the moment, and a moment is something that we should never let go to waste.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

31. “Because when you have this much personality, there’s a fear lurking just below the surface: If you knew all of me, you wouldn’t love me anymore.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

32. “It was a lesson for me. Even in my loneliest times, I knew I could go deep into my imagination and create a better reality for myself. And then that’s built into my life in so many other areas. Those little moments kept me expanding instead of shrinking into myself.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

33. “You can’t be fiercely loving without also being passionate – and sometimes passionate isn’t pretty. What might seem testy is actually scar tissue, the residual effects of trauma that I lived through.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

34. “Just like joy and pain coexist, so can discomfort and humor. Which is why you gotta buckle up buttercup, because I can go from comedy to tragedy in three seconds flat. And that’s not damaged or not normal. I hope culturally we can continue to normalize the idea that being a survivor is so much more common than anyone realizes and we all deserve to be heard, but more importantly are deserving of a recovery full of love, laughter, and light.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

35. “I got paralyzed by things. I’m pretty sure that ‘I hate uncertainty’ was my first full sentence as a baby.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

36. “There are a million ways to reach recovery. Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t find a way that works for you.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

37. “But still, I struggle with body images and then struggle with the fact that I’m still struggling with them – enough already!”

— Jonathan Van Ness

38. “I live off coffee until 3 in the afternoon, and then try to be balanced, but the next thing I know I’m face down in a plate of garlic bread.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

39. “For all the times I’ve been hurt I did some hurting.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

40. “If I’ve learned anything, it’s that acceptance is the key to so much, and we find so much freedom in feeling fierce about what we’re accepting.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

41. “We were all just doing the best we could with what we knew, and I just didn’t know very much back then.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

42. “I have come to learn, though, that the more you love and accept yourself, the less you need other people’s approval. I never want my childlike spirit, my desire to learn and entertain, to change.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

43. “My default is to be really critical of myself, but the world will do that for me, so I gotta make sure I always know I have my back.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

44. “My joy and my accomplishments existed, and so did the pain from my abuse. How can we feel one without the other? Joyful accomplishments exist next to painful memories. I found a lot of my healing when I realized my suffering didn’t undo my joy.”

— Jonathan Van Ness

45. “At the end of the day, the people we let in our space affect our ability to get to where we want to go, so if they’re in the way of realizing your potential, it’s okay to disconnect because you must choose yourself.”

— Jonathan Van Ness