Top 35 Susie Orbach Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’m a therapist and that fascinates people because they think I carry secrets.”

— Susie Orbach

2. “Fat is a social disease, and fat is a feminist issue.”

— Susie Orbach

3. “There is no such thing as a neutral therapist.”

— Susie Orbach

4. “Our idea of a healthy body is so destabilised that insecure people have come to bolster their own bodies by deeming others – those with fat bodies – less worthy, less capable and less employable.”

— Susie Orbach

5. “Being able to provoke a different point of view to the standard current ideological or political perspective as played out in conventional newspaper or radio reportage is what a public intellectual does. But it’s not merely about being oppositional, because that’s too negative.”

— Susie Orbach

6. “Public intellectuals come from a range of areas and use their expertise to comment more widely than just their field. They want to make a contribution to public space, and they stick their necks out to do it.”

— Susie Orbach

7. “From a child’s point of view, there is rarely a great time for parents to separate, even if there has been a lot of commotion and fighting.”

— Susie Orbach

8. “Boys, young men, men of all ages are being captivated by the new visual grammar which pushes men to pout and posture.”

— Susie Orbach

9. “I wish we could treat our bodies as the place we live from, rather than regard it as a place to be worked on, as though it were a disagreeable old kitchen in need of renovation and update.”

— Susie Orbach

10. “The insistence that the commercialisation of the body is a fit subject for political discussion and intervention is well overdue.”

— Susie Orbach

11. “In general, the Western body has become a global brand.”

— Susie Orbach

12. “I thought of the analyst Winnicott’s observation: ‘It is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found’.”

— Susie Orbach

13. “I’d like to see much more understanding of emotional issues around hurt, abandonment, disappointment, longing, failure and shame, where they stem from and how they drive people and policies brought into public discourse.”

— Susie Orbach

14. “Mothers unconsciously allow more latitude to sons, and open encouragement, and with daughters they treat them as they would treat themselves.”

— Susie Orbach

15. “Fat people are so rarely included in visual culture that fat is perceived as a blot on the landscape of sleek and slim.”

— Susie Orbach

16. “Celebrity culture is something that pains me.”

— Susie Orbach

17. “If I were afraid of wrinkles, I’d probably be hiding in a cupboard, because I have a lot of them.”

— Susie Orbach

18. “There are so many young women who tip over into being a facsimile: they don’t really inhabit their lives or their bodies.”

— Susie Orbach

19. “Today, ‘fat’ has become not a description of size but a moral category tainted with criticism and contempt.”

— Susie Orbach

20. “Many young girls are constantly consumed by controlling and managing their body image to the extent that they are much more involved in the production of the self than in living.”

— Susie Orbach

21. “No one likes to feel helpless. We find it psychologically unbearable and inside ourselves we may try to make ourselves part author of our misfortune rather than simply the recipient of it.”

— Susie Orbach

22. “Consumer society tantalises us. We then try within ourselves to control the needs that are being constantly stimulated.”

— Susie Orbach

23. “Bodies are becoming our personal mission to tame, extend and perfect.”

— Susie Orbach

24. “I’ve always felt very sympathetic from the first days of writing about women that, whatever the woman, whether she is trying to be a woman in the conventional sense or breaking the boundaries, those struggles are quite difficult.”

— Susie Orbach

25. “When they took TV to Fiji they found that after 3 years nearly 12 girls out of 100 were over the toilet bowls with bulimia because they felt inferior.”

— Susie Orbach

26. “No one leaves a long-term relationship scot-free or without conflict.”

— Susie Orbach

27. “A wanted pregnancy as much as a dreaded pregnancy can play differently than all one’s previous imaginings.”

— Susie Orbach

28. “We know that ever woman wants to be thin. Our images of womanhood are almost synonymous with thinness.”

— Susie Orbach

29. “Beauty has been democratised. No longer the preserve of movie stars and models but available to all. But while the invitation to beauty is welcomed, it has become not so much an option as an imperative.”

— Susie Orbach

30. “In my mum’s day, you needed to be beautiful for a very short time to catch your man. It didn’t start at six and go on until you’re 75, right?”

— Susie Orbach

31. “If you continually diet, you are putting your body in a quasi-famine situation. It slows your metabolism down and breaks the thermostat. Diets don’t work. They don’t help you understand why you’re eating more than your body wanted in the first place.”

— Susie Orbach

32. “Not that it was Twiggy’s fault, but the ubiquity of her image created a sense in young women that to be stylish meant to be skinny, flat-chested with an ingenue face and straight hair.”

— Susie Orbach

33. “We accept there’s an emotional aspect to life. But we’re not very developed in our ways of understanding it.”

— Susie Orbach

34. “Fat is a way of saying no to powerlessness and self-denial.”

— Susie Orbach

35. “When I was growing up, one or two girls were beautiful, but it was not an aspiration, right?”

— Susie Orbach

36. “I’m the sort of person who likes to undo everything.”

— Susie Orbach

37. “I think it is one of the capacities of human beings, to create style.”

— Susie Orbach