Top 30 Kelly Jensen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We all have things – and sometimes people – we are unable to look in the eye.”

— Kelly Jensen

2. “Feminism is not a physical uniform.”

— Kelly Jensen

3. “Feminism isn’t about the specific, individual choices people make in how they look and feel. Feminism is about how an individual’s ability t make choices about how they look and feel and take care of themselves.”

— Kelly Jensen

4. “But it was the women and the girls that blew me away. So many of them looked like me with wide noses, big saucer eyes, large breasts, short bodies, tiny hands, and hairy arms.”

— Kelly Jensen

5. “It was another feeling I didn’t know I missed until I felt it – feeling a part of something, feeling like you are not the odd one out, feeling like everyone else. And I would walk into shops with my curly hair cooperating beautifully in the thick, hot air, and the store owners would speak Spanish to me, and it was comfortable. And it was happy. And I felt like me.”

— Kelly Jensen

6. “I want to be independent, but I want to be taken care of and have someone to come home to.”

— Kelly Jensen

7. “When I drive to work, I listen to thuggish rap at a very loud volume, even though the lyrics are degrading to women and offend me to my core.”

— Kelly Jensen

8. “If I take issue with the unrealistic standards of beauty women are held to, I shouldn’t have a secret fondness for fashion and smooth calves, right?”

— Kelly Jensen

9. “But here’s the thing: other people’s opinions are not the truth. We live in a world that puts us into boxes and labels them with Sharpies, yet those boxes are lies. They flatten us; they limit who we really are. Feminism.”

— Kelly Jensen

10. “Feminism is about recognizing power and fighting to distribute it equally, regardless of race or class or ability or gender. Feminism is not static, and it never has been. In fact, feminism demands change.”

— Kelly Jensen

11. “It made me realize I never really wanted to look like my friends at all. They were beautiful, but it wasn’t any specific trait that made them beautiful: it was that I felt like they were the only definition of pretty.”

— Kelly Jensen

12. “I define “depression,” but depression does not define me because you cannot define a person. Not with a single word, not with an entire book. Human beings defy definition. Yet the stigma surrounding mental illness makes some believe we can use it to define others, and it often deceives us into believing we must use it to define ourselves.”

— Kelly Jensen

13. “When we think of interdependence, we often think about relationships with people and with communities. Giving and receiving help from friends, neighbors, and family link us all together. As my body has changed, I have become more dependent on objects and have grown to appreciate them as part of this complex infrastructure that facilitates my survival.”

— Kelly Jensen

14. “Maybe my “meddling” words did little to change the teacher’s private view, but at least I identified myself as an advocate for the student.”

— Kelly Jensen

15. “If he loves you, then he will respect you, and what more perfect way is there for him to demonstrate that love and respect than by supporting your advocacy on behalf of feminism?”

— Kelly Jensen

16. “That they are hers and hers alone to make mistakes with, to connect with, to have beautiful experiences with, to share with whomever she chooses?”

— Kelly Jensen

17. “Maybe the “forever” in my valediction was a similar attempt to declare my unwavering selfhood even though I sensed change coming like a spring flood down a mountainside.”

— Kelly Jensen

18. “The fact that you have lived through every single one of your most awful days is legitimate proof that you can do it again. Statistics are on your side. You got this.”

— Kelly Jensen

19. “I want to be in charge, respected, in control, but I want to surrender, completely, in certain aspects of my life. Who wants to grow up?”

— Kelly Jensen

20. “Our bodies and minds are always working together, but we don’t always treat them as two equally important parts of who we are. It is far easier, for example, to take a day off from life because of the flu than it is to take one off because of having a case of the sads. But both of these things are valid and have a tremendous impact on how we move through the world.”

— Kelly Jensen

21. “By redefining what it means to be a “woman,” feminism also redefines what it means to be a “man.”

— Kelly Jensen

22. “Don’t let the Muggle-like thoughts dim your magic, dear!”

— Kelly Jensen

23. “I care what people think.”

— Kelly Jensen

24. “And that when we say “It Gets Better,” it doesn’t mean “Everything Gets Solved.” It means you will still carry the weight from when things weren’t good, but you will be stronger for it the next time you’re unhappy – and that time will come.”

— Kelly Jensen

25. “When I choose to love my body, to look at it with compassion and remember all the awesome things it can do, I am rebelling against a system that wants to keep me down. I am actively protesting the status quo that aims to keep me self-obsessed, self-critical, and self-oppressing.”

— Kelly Jensen

26. “Feminism isn’t a glass slipper that fits only one perfect woman; it is an umbrella that has to become big enough to protect us all, even from one another.”

— Kelly Jensen

27. “Disavowing body obsession is also a political act because it refuses to pay money and time to a billion-dollar “beauty” industry that benefits directly from women’s insecurity.”

— Kelly Jensen

28. “When I had my gallbladder removed in 2010, no one dismissed me because a part of my digestive system was faulty. No one listened to something I had to say and responded, “He can’t be trusted – he doesn’t have a gallbladder.” Yet this happens all too frequently with those who live with mental illness. We are dismissed, distrusted, told our thoughts are not our own.”

— Kelly Jensen

29. “I love babies, and I want to have one.”

— Kelly Jensen

30. “Bodies aren’t simply biological. They are radical tools. They are physical and political. They impact our mental well.”

— Kelly Jensen

31. “If I am, indeed, a feminist, I am a rather bad one. I am a mess of contradictions.”

— Kelly Jensen

32. “And society will want to vilify her for loving herself and for the choices she will make in pursuit of that love.”

— Kelly Jensen

33. “These were the best moments. The kisses that just happened – that could only happen with Zed, the only man he felt fully comfortable with. Kisses were intimate and personal. They were promises without words. And, really, who needed words? Felix’s tongue never got him into trouble when he was kissing.”

— Kelly Jensen

34. “I did just what society asked of me: I tried to show the world my ability and denied myself my disability.”

— Kelly Jensen