Top 120 Lindy West Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We only get one life. Wasting someone’s time is the subtlest form of murder.”

— Lindy West

2. “Real change is slow, hard, and imperceptible.”

— Lindy West

3. “We’re all building our world, right now, in real time. Let’s build it better.”

— Lindy West

4. “Just live! Live now! Don’t wait, and don’t let anyone tell you that you’re a work in progress.”

— Lindy West

5. “If my chair collapses under me right now, people will assume it’s because I’m fat. But if your chair collapses under you, it’s because you sat in a broken chair.”

— Lindy West

6. “We live and then we stop living. We exist and then we stop existing. That means I only get one chance to do a good job. I want to do a good job.”

— Lindy West

7. “Everything is a product of its time, and the whole point of progress is to make the future better than the present. People make mistakes, and people grow, and culture grows along with them.”

— Lindy West

8. “The real scam is that being bones isn’t enough either. The game is rigged. There is no perfection.”

— Lindy West

9. “Trust your instincts. Believe your eyes.”

— Lindy West

10. “Sincerity is an easy target, but I don’t want to excise sincerity from my life – that’s a lonely way to live.”

— Lindy West

11. “In the omnidirectional orgy gardens of Vlaxnoid 7, no one cares about your arm flab.”

— Lindy West

12. “For me, the process of embodying confidence was less about convincing myself of my own worth and more about rejecting and unlearning what society had hammered into me.”

— Lindy West

13. “You can hate someone and love them at the same time. Maybe that’s a natural side effect of searching for heroes in a world not built for you.”

— Lindy West

14. “Choose to be kind. That notion of choice – of choosing what kind of person you want to be – is more important now than ever. If our country isn’t going to take care of everyone, we must take of the people left behind.”

— Lindy West

15. “Nobody wants to sit next to a fat person on a plane. Don’t think we don’t know. That’s why – to return to my first-class flight – my foray into “luxury” was so disheartening. It wasn’t a taste of the high life so much as an infuriating illumination of how dismal it is to fly any other way. I realized: Oh. Flying first class wasn’t intrinsically special, but it was the first time in recent memory that I’ve felt like a human being on a plane.”

— Lindy West

16. “Why, when men hate themselves, it’s women who take the beatings.”

— Lindy West

17. “Loving yourself is not antithetical to health, it is intrinsic to health. You can’t take good care of a thing you hate.”

— Lindy West

18. “I’ve only had a handful of moments like that in my life – where I could see how thin the veil was between my happy, intact world and its complete destruction. How few steps there were between the mundane and the unthinkable. You can see why people stay quiet. Can you see, yet, why I speak up? Wouldn’t.”

— Lindy West

19. “Feminism is really just the long slow realization that the things you love hate you.”

— Lindy West

20. “It’s so pathetic, the tough-guy posturing, but so sinister, because, to put it plainly, that’s how black men die. Insecure, pee-pants white men assume that any disagreement is a life-threatening situation. Dave assumed Aham was dangerous, and was prepared to shoot him with a gun, even though Dave was the only one in the equation who’d issued a threat of any kind.”

— Lindy West

21. “The problem is people weaseling out of the growth. We are addicted to not being inconvenienced by reality. Even in mundane circumstances.”

— Lindy West

22. “In a certain light, feminism is just the long, slow realization that the stuff you love hates you.”

— Lindy West

23. “To be shrill is to reach above your station; to abandon your duty to soothe and please; in short, to be heard. I.”

— Lindy West

24. “It’s hard to feel hurt or frightened when you’re flooded with pity. It’s hard to be cold or cruel when you remember it’s hard to be a person.”

— Lindy West

25. “The idea is that people in positions of power should avoid making jokes at the expense of the powerless. That’s.”

— Lindy West

26. “My dad is gone now and so is that Seattle, but walking in the places he walked, puffing up the same hills, turning the same corners, I feel him in the ridges and grooves of my city – we are close, superimposed, separated only by time, and what’s that? This is the only religion that I can relate to.”

— Lindy West

27. “Every human being is a wet, gassy katamari of triumphs, traumas, scars, coping mechanisms, parental baggage, weird stuff you saw on the Internet too young, pressure from your grandma to take over the bodega when what you really want to do is dance, and all the other fertilizer that makes a smear of DNA grow into a fully formed toxic avenger.”

— Lindy West

28. “Willpower is real, but it needs the right conditions to thrive.”

— Lindy West

29. “We have to be the witches they’ve always said we are, and counter their magic with our own.”

— Lindy West

30. “Being on Twitter felt like being in a nonconsensual BDSM relationship with the apocolypse.”

— Lindy West

31. “The idea that we can somehow escape affecting each other is deeply conservative. Barbarous, even.”

— Lindy West

32. “Maybe you are thin. You hiked that trail and you are fit and beautiful and wanted and I am so proud of you, I am so in awe of your wiry brightness; and I’m miles behind you, my breathing ragged. But you didn’t carry this up the mountain, You only carried yourself. How hard would you breathe if you had to carry me? You couldn’t. But I can.”

— Lindy West

33. “Vashon is an island, accessible by ferry from Seattle, mainly populated by NIMBY-ish hippies, NIMBY-ish yuppies, boutique farmers, and wizards riding recumbent bicycles. A full quarter of the children in Vashon schools are unvaccinated.”

— Lindy West

34. “Step Ten: Neglect to Tell the Heavy Metal Doofus You Lose Your Virginity to that It’s Your First Time and Then Bleed All Over His Bed “Okay, but, having your bed anointed with virgin’s blood is like the most metal thing ever, right?” “You should go.” Step.”

— Lindy West

35. “Please don’t forget: I am my body. When my body gets smaller, it is still me. When my body gets bigger, it is still me. There is not a thin woman inside me, awaiting excavation. I am one piece.”

— Lindy West

36. “You only have to look back five years to see a different world and, by extension, tangible proof that culture is ours to shape, if we try.”

— Lindy West

37. “So fine, if you insist. This is a witch hunt. We’re witches, and we’re hunting you.”

— Lindy West

38. “Maybe women would finally be considered fully formed human beings, instead of off-brand men with defective genitals. Maybe.”

— Lindy West

39. “Mike made me feel lonely, and being alone with another person is much worse than being alone all by yourself.”

— Lindy West

40. “Americans are addicted to plausible deniability.”

— Lindy West

41. “So, what do you do when you’re too big, in a world where bigness is cast not only as aesthetically objectionable, but also as a moral failing? You fold yourself up like origami, you make yourself smaller in other ways, you take up less space with your personality, since you can’t with your body. You diet. You starve, you run till you taste blood in your throat, you count out your almonds, you try to buy back your humanity with pounds of flesh.”

— Lindy West

42. “Change is hard, and slow, but he bothered to do it. Sometimes people on the defensive rebound into compassion. Sometimes smart, good people are just a little behind.”

— Lindy West

43. “Gay people wearing shawl-collar half-zip ecru sweaters does not oppress Christians. Christians turning their gay children out on to the streets, keeping gay spouses from sitting at each other’s deathbeds, and casting gay people as diseased predators so that it’s easier to justify beating and murdering them does oppress gay people. That.”

— Lindy West

44. “Around that time, just when I needed it, Leonard Nimoy’s Full Body Project came to me like a gift. The photographs are in black and white, and they feature a group of fat, naked women laughing, smiling, embracing, gazing fearlessly into the camera. In one, they sway indolently like the Three Graces; in another they re-create Herb Ritts’s iconic pile of supermodels. It was the first time I’d ever seen fat women presented without scorn. I.”

— Lindy West

45. “Thanks for nothing, regular human mom. Footnote: nothing except for the unconditional love and support and meticulous care to make sure I faced the world fully informed about my body and reproductive health.”

— Lindy West

46. “I fervently believe that people shouldn’t stay in bad relationships just because of some artificial rom-com notion of true love being “forever.” In fact, I think that the pressure of conforming to that framework ruins-literally RUINS-a lot of people’s lives.”

— Lindy West

47. “Each time something like this happens, take a breath and ask yourself, honestly: Am I dead? Did I die? Is the world different? Has my soul splintered into a thousand shards and scattered to the winds? I think you’ll find, in nearly every case, that you are fine.”

— Lindy West

48. “I spent a lot of time alone as a kid. I’ve never been an easy hugger. The social conventions that keep human beings separate and discrete – boundaries, etiquette, privacy, personal space – have always been a great well of safety to me. I am a rule follower. I like choosing whom I let in close. The emotional state of emergency following a death necessarily breaks those conventions down, and, unfortunately, I am bad at being human without them. I.”

— Lindy West

49. “When faced with a choice between an incriminating truth or a flattering lie, America’s ruling class has been choosing the lie for four hundred years.”

— Lindy West

50. “The “perfect body” is a lie. I believed in it for a long time, and I let it shape my life, and shrink it – my real life, populated by my real body. Don’t let fiction tell you what to do.”

— Lindy West