#I’m not debasing myself in front of people I respect

[ladygoofball]

Adults need to stay out of self indulgent fan spaces. Is this reactionary content for adults? Or do we want them to keep playing the soundtrack of our pains and misery for clicks and laughs.

This is Nobody’s problem Consider it a gesture of good PR when it smacks you in the face.

It should not have to be my problem right now. I am tired.

But riddle me this:

If you saw thought that Keith Harring would have put his entire fucking ass on the line to make sure Aaron Bushnell’s name did not get forgotten?

You’re not alone. I am always being told I am too inexperienced. I need to shovel someone else’s mess for no money. My cats are dying and I don’t have time.

Consider this a healing word:

I have people who are in film school right now? Who can’t fathom a world where the people in front of them can’t fucking conceptualize having the wind knocked out of you with just the power of their words. But a Director comes to fans saying they are tired. The industry is collapsing. I’ll make a whole god damned new one do not TEMPT me with magnum opus status. They do not understand the definition of the word.

That…can’t be right? Is it? You’re all letting the industry standard of VIDEO GAMES whore out your art? Your craft?

For elon fucking MUSK!!

I have had to endure THAT? For weeks. In my self indulgent spaces. Fan run shit and Corporate shit need to be separated. Grooming on the internet moves too quickly. We need to stop allowing grown ass adults to fall into grooming algorithms because Elon FUCKING Musk bought them all. The way that this video game is communicating to us sonatically without REST?!! like we can’t get the POINT?!

It’s always too late.

I have been afraid of going near a good idea for too long but my ideas? KEEP GETTING FLIRTED WITH IN CHAT ROOMS. But everyone is too tired to take my words anywhere.

Nobody gives a damn now BITCH.

Over seven excruciating fucking years i’ve had my ideas flirted with and gone nowhere. That is how groomers speak on the internet now. They never wanted me to know. I can’t say who. I was in film school. They told me I was not smart enough with my degree to redefine the word comic book. I keep having my ideas flirted with and having nothing done about it around VALENTINE’s DAy which was actually supposed to be my birthday. I was born on the 10th of February though.

I cannot put my family’s names out there in a military regime. My money? Is being used to kill kids. Already.

Algorithms are smarter than me? No, i tell THEM how THEY work. With my words.

But NOBODY cares

Tumblr was the first fucking space I had where groomers would make me fucking react to them and keep me on the line for suicide watch. You don’t think I know what crazy sounds like? When your psyche is fractured?

When they want you to have read books you can’t understand out loud and laugh in your face when you try? You need to plug in to the internet

That can’t be your only media diet. It can’t be! I have to change that.

Do you think you are going crazy right now?

That is. An algorithm at work. Bought and paid for, cheap, commercial bullshit. I promise a good idea can sound just as good on a dead platform as it can on a groomers fucking paradise. They won’t publish Jeffery Epstein list.

Nobody will.

Maybe that’s a good thing? Maybe that is intentional. I cannot fucking believe that I have to debase myself using TUMBLR to act like a fan in order for people to start getting more literary with demanding combat training and rest from your video games. I need oaths sworn on camera that I can take that team to combat training and get their fucking winds sailing. No one else seems to want to do it anymore, and I really can’t afford to wait another minute. My cats are dying i’m in tracy chapmans fast car. My cat yowls whenever I get activated now, I can’t stop hearing the day care that I worked for but I was told I was not qualified to work in. I need a FUCKIng BREAK from creating for god damned NOBODY.

I have been telling Elliot for 7 years. That it will be okay. I don’t have hopes left, I’m going to lose them because I don’t have a job.

I am tracy chapmans fast car.

I have a list of video games that you would love, if your self indulgent spaces are getting too full of Marketing getting cheap reactions out of someone for LAUGHS. They think they can take screenshots of my words to pass along and make themselves feel better without sharing?

Who the hell do you think I am? I invented overthinking on the internet motherfucker.

They think you forgot the definition of the word. They did that to you on purpose.

Please tell me you are alright. Because this word doesn’t sound right in your head it’s concerning it’s alarming. It’s going faster than I can type.

[rgr-pop]

psychotic post here. hm okay so like, I cant fit everything in my life that is in my life and unfortunately due to me I think that some of the things that have to go are uhhh relationships. given the choice I would have no relationships with anyone (no friends life empty) and I know I shouldn’t indulge that too much but also just like realistically I need to untangle myself from some dynamics that are so taxing and not fixable to me which do not produce... relationship benefits ? the gossip throuple is NOT one, I think we have the potential to enable incredibly bad habits but we’ve already worked on some together (mythic social activity spotted in real life) and I have been able to go to them for constructive but also just fun soothing support in this current mental health crisis. so they’re a good relationship (keep an eye on). I have to quit pod activities altogether for a while due to life but also because our close quarters caused too much like occasional low level bitchiness or annoyance that I don’t have resilience for right now, nobody’s fault tho (ok mine and Alex’s fault). I also probably can’t deal with being in the public eye for a while due to various reasons, one reason being that dealing with organizing conflicts with anarchists/community organizing libs has exposed me to that culture where every single part of your comportment and language is under a moralist microscope 24/7 which is really not mixing well with my contamination ocd full time job lol. anyway historically the pod has been great for my perfectionist insecurities (comfort with saying dumb shit in front of people is important and healthy) but right now I’m being subject to various tribunals by anarcholibs about whether I’m too flippant in my language, too serious about sexism, whether I talk too much, whether I speak professionally enough, whether I am too dogmatic etc and so on. and those are the same spaces where I have felt low key objectified and like I had to be paranoid I was being treated differently due to being the ugly one, etc. needless to say I would like to be not looked at for a while! and a step back will be good for me and alex not bickering lol, keeping us loving and comradely. things got really bad for he and I both at the same time and our overexposure made it so I couldn’t be there for him. but there are other relationships I have to look at. I just had an incident with a comrade where like, after a big argument in one group, he said something dismissive I forgot about immediately and then later I said something really flippant as a joke in a meeting that had to do with something he worked on and it REALLY hurt his feelings and he interpreted it as retaliatory. and I WAS wrong in the primary way I make mistakes: acting without thinking. and we had a really decent repair over it. but the fact is I feel genuinely invested in helping him grow but he isn’t invested in like... my well being. which is like, fine. but I can’t keep sending him pep talks when he can’t defend me in public, you know? what I gotta do is remind myself we are NOT friends. this was all supposed to lead into a question about a juice reward friendship that takes up a lot of my time but leaves me feeling unheard but I realize I was just gonna have to ask you about doing a friend breakup lol. meanwhile i am so afraid to get close to the one comrade I respect and cherish the most because it’s just too debasing! I miss Ashley, my one best friend I see Sometimes And That’s Enough But It’s Not Enough But She Respects My Boundaries We’re Both Trying Our Best

[jounetsunosymphonia]

Nocturnality (Mankai Stage Winter 2020 translation)

translation for the stage version of winter’s third play! song can be found in full here.

ALRIGHT FOLKS IT’S THE GAY PEOPLE. HERE WE GO. a lot of it is actually like...silent? you can hear it in the soundtrack ver that it’s just inst with some occasional sound effects and i’ll write in what’s happening, but i just think it’s interesting that that’s how they decided to go about showing things for noct. i mean, it makes sense. show not tell amirite.

cast list

Yukishiro Azuma (Ueda Kandai) as Kuto Reo Takato Tasuku (Kitazono Ryo) as Seo Kota Mikage Hisoka (Ueda Keisuke) as Franz Arisugawa Homare (Tanaka Ryousei) as Nonomiya Tsukioka Tsumugi (Aramaki Yoshihiko) as Izumi Ryohei

-

(the curtain rises. kota is going about his business, reading and sleeping on the couch in the foreground, going to work at his office. in the background, reo drinks from an unsuspecting passerby, but is accosted by a vampire hunter in white. franz shows up to have a knife fight with the vampire hunter, but reo is injured, and falls into kota’s arms as he’s walking home.)

Kota: Hey!

Reo: Help...me...

-

Reo: Good morning. You were a great help yesterday.

Kota: Did you make this?

Reo: It’s just from what was in the fridge, so it’s nothing special, but I wanted to give you something as thanks for letting me stay the night.

Kota: Amazing. What are you, a wife?

Reo: I’ve lived this long, but I think this is the first time someone’s called me a wife.

(kota takes a bite of the sandwich reo made him, but the funny part is that bc of the face shield requirement, it doesn’t make it to his mouth. the poor man can’t eat his wife’s cooking. rest in pieces.)

Kota: It’s good! I’m Seo Kota. And you are?

Reo: Reo...Kuto Reo.

Kota: Reo. If you don’t have anywhere else to go, you can stay here for a while.

Reo: You’d let a man you don’t even know stay in your house?

Kota: Eh, well...my room’s nice and clean...and this is delicious. If you stay, it’ll be a big help for me too.

Reo: You’re really trusting, aren’t you. Well, I’ll be in your care, then.

Kota: Aren’t you going to eat?

Reo: I eat at irregular times. Don’t mind me, just eat.

[winter telepathy time part 1] Azuma: (Just as I’d expect from you. You’re really giving off this feeling of helplessness that’s nothing like how you are normally.)

Tasuku: (The version of me that always seems strong might be the one that’s acting, though.)

Azuma: (You can say something like that without hesitation...you’re an adult, so you are strong.)

Tasuku: (Because we’ve got these members...let’s take this to the very end, in a delicate way fitting for Winter.)

Azuma: (Yes, let’s.)

-

Kota: I’m off.

Reo: Take care.

Kota: So you’re just going to send me out. Yesterday...you asked me for help...

Reo: I’m sorry...

-

Izumi: Oh, do you live here? I just moved in, I’m Izumi.

Kota: I’m Seo. Nice to meet you.

Izumi: You’re on your way to work, right? Sorry for stopping you.

Kota: No, it’s alright. If you ever have any problems, please let me know.

-

Nonomiya: Hey, I heard. You picked someone up off the street? That’s way too suspicious. This isn’t an afternoon drama or a manga for middle-aged ladies.

Kota: Give me a break. Reo’s a good guy. And he can cook.

Nonomiya: (sigh.) If you say stuff like that it’s only gonna hurt you.

[winter telepathy time part 2] Homare: (Well, well, how is it? My acting as an office worker.)

Tasuku: (Honestly, I’m surprised. You can even do a role like this smoothly now, huh.)

Homare: (An outstanding artist can excel in anything they do.)

Tasuku: (How reliable.)

Homare: (Now, continue as you like. The rest of us shall support you.)

-

(kota goes home. he and reo spend time talking together until he seems to get tired, when reo helps him over to the bed.)

Reo Saying that I’m sorry Might not be fair I’m eating away at your life And yet I wonder why Even though I want your blood, I don’t want it

(and then reo dramatically leans over kota and just, Bite)

Kota: Sorry about last night.

Reo: ...what for?

Kota: I’ve been having a lot of nightmares lately. I must be noisy in my sleep.

Reo: No, you’ve been sleeping quietly.

Kota: That’s good, then.

Reo: Rather than worry about someone else, you should look after yourself...

Kota: Huh?

Reo: Nothing. Are you feeling well? Can you go to work?

Kota: Yeah. I had some of your cooking, so I’m fine. I’m off.

-

Izumi: Good morning.

Kota: Good morning.

Izumi: Ah, Seo-san. Are you off on weekdays as well? I’ve been hearing noises from next door in the middle of the day, so...

Kota: Oh, no. I just have a friend over.

Izumi: Is that so...a friend. (i love this part bc when he says ““ah. a friend.”” he goes from being nice gentle neighbour to “were it not for the fact that you were a human i would have murdered you where you stand” in like zero seconds, thanks mackey)

[winter telepathy time part 3] Tasuku: (How is everyone, Tsumugi?)

Tsumugi: (To put it simply, I’ve got respect for them. No matter how minute an action is, they can return it, and everyone’s acting is so varied, it’s interesting.)

Tasuku: (Jeez, you’re the one who does that the most and you’re going to say it?)

Tsumugi: (We...started acting so that one day we’d meet Winter, didn’t we.)

Tasuku: (...we did.)

-

Nonomiya: Oi, Seo. You look terrible.

Kota: I just didn’t get any sleep, I guess.

Nonomiya: It’s not just today. You’ve been like this the whole week. That’s when you met that freeloader, right? Something’s just off about him.

Kota: I told you, it’s not Reo’s fault.

Nonomiya: No, he’s too suspicious. I’m coming with you.

-

Franz: Well, you’ve found a nice place to lay your head, haven’t you? Care to share it with me?

Reo: It’s not like that. Don’t interfere.

Franz: Ah, how cold! Isn’t that a part of our relationship?

Reo: If that’s all you wanted from me, then leave, Franz.

Franz I don’t know what it is you’ve become so infatuated with But we cannot—

Reo I know, the sun’s light is too strong ...and yet, I’ll end up longing for it anyway

Franz Hatred of the dark—

Reo I can’t help but wish—

Franz —is humanity’s weakness

Reo —that we’d be able to live alongside each other

Kota: Eh? Reo...who’s that?

Nonomiya: Wait, that’s who you picked up? I knew it, he’s definitely suspicious!

Kota: I told you, he isn’t like that. Hey, Reo!

(i just wanna point out here it’s so funny he goes from :( at nono to the gentlest voice calling out to reo, and nonomiya just loOKS SO PISSED LIKE . HUH? WHAT ARE YOU BEING SOFT AT HIM FOR. HEY.)

Reo: Kota...

Franz: Is that him? Well, he does have a good physique... (franz licks his fangs i hate it so much u all need to know this)

Reo: Franz, let’s go somewhere else.

Nonomiya: They ran off! Those guys are probably part of some criminal organisation or something, right?!

Kota: That’s enough, Nonomiya! But...why did he ignore me...?

Kota Letting you stay in my home Might be unfair

Kota, Reo I’m getting used to having you around You’re a man I just met, only by coincidence But I always want to be with you

Franz: You haven’t been drinking blood much, have you?

Reo: Since I’m staying in his home, I can’t bring myself to drink from him properly.

Franz: Is that not the entire point of this human? Just hurry up and drink already, you’ll die.

Reo: That’s what I wanted to do at first.

-

Kota: Why did you just run away without saying anything...Reo...

-

Franz: Our pursuers are closing in on this neighbourhood. That’s what I came here to tell you.

Reo: Thank you.

Franz: Have you no intention of leaving that house? Surely, at this point—

Reo: It’s fine. It’ll be fine.

-

(kota is asleep on the floor by the couch by the time reo gets back home and thEY ARE LITERALLY SITTING LIKE THE DAMN POSTER HOLDING HANDS AS REO SINGS THE NEXT PART)

Reo Even if it isn’t fair for me to apologise I need to tell you I’m glad I met you So I’ll leave it til the end I want your blood I want it more than anyone else

-

Reo: You’ve been such a great help. I didn’t mean to stay for so long, but I got too comfortable.

Kota: There’s no need for you to leave so soon, since it’s easier on me too, anyway.

Reo: That’s not why I’m leaving.

Kota: Have you found a place to stay?

Reo: Kind of. Kota...thank you.

-

Kota: Oh, Izumi-san. Good morning.

Reo: You...!

Izumi: So you’re moving out? Well, here’s a going-away present.

Reo: Kota, get back! (izumi runs him right through with a sword. a whole sword.)

Kota: Izumi-san?

Izumi: What a shame. It’s only been a little while, but we were neighbours too! (he twists the sword while it’s still in reo, he’s a terrible man and i love him)

Kota: What are you doing?!

(some very excellent sword swinging and mad cackling from izumisan while reo is suffering and falls to the ground. thank you mackey.)

Izumi: Filthy creature of the night. Thou shalt be eradicated in the name of my blood pact!

(kota runs in front of reo.)

Izumi: Out of the way. I’ll kill you as well.

Reo: Stop! Kota has nothing to do with this!

Izumi: Ha! The two of you are friendly, aren’t you. Even though humans are nothing more than meals to your kind.

Kota: Meals...? What are you talking about?

Izumi: He’s a vampire. Humans’ enemy.

Kota: Vampire? Reo would never...! (he backs away from reo for a bit)

Reo: Kota...

Izumi: Now, hand him over.

(kota goes back to reo and protectively puts his arms around him.)

Izumi: Ah, so you’ve debased yourself to the level of an underling of blood. No matter. I’ll send you both off.

(franz jumps from the steps, fending off izumi’s sword with his two entire knives i love stage ver. he even twirls a knife as he talks.)

Franz: Oh, my. I thought I’d join in myself, but it looks like I’ve drawn the short end of the stick. Well, it can’t be helped. I’ll give you a hand.

Izumi: Accursed vampire...

(EXTREMELY GOOD SWORD + KNIFE FIGHT IT’S GOOD THAT’S ALL I CAN TELL YOU THEY’RE EXCELLENT I LOVE THEM)

[winter telepathy time part 4] Tsumugi: (This is amazing, Hisoka-kun. Your movements are far more polished than they were during rehearsals.)

Hisoka: (I don’t even need to think, my body’s just moving on its own. I don’t know why, though.)

Tsumugi: (Maybe it has something to do with your past.)

Hisoka: (I want to face them too...like Azuma...my memories...)

(THIS ENTIRE TIME THEY ARE STILL AGGRESSIVELY KNIFE FIGHTING EVEN WHILE THEY’RE HAVING THIS INTERNAL CONVERSATION I LOSE MY SHIT EVERY TIME)

(franz disarms izumi and kicks him in the face.)

Franz: Want to keep going?

Izumi: Humanity will not yield to your kind. The white blade shall invariably pass judgement upon you! (he runs away like a little bitch but at least he got a real fight this time)

Kota: Reo! Reo!!

Franz: Can you leave him to me?

Kota: But...

Franz: Worry not. He and I are the same.

Kota: ...Fine. Please take care of him.

Franz: There’s a good boy.

Kota There’s no need for you to apologise I’ll give you my blood So please, please Live I don’t want to lose you

(IN AT LEAST ONE OF THE LIVE VERSIONS HE SOUNDS LIKE HE’S STARTING TO CRY AS HE’S SINGING THE LAST LINE. WHAT EVEN IS STAGE NOCT)

-

Reo: Where’s Kota...?

Franz: He’s fine. You don’t expect me to ask him to share some of his blood, do you?

Reo: ...thank you, Franz.

Franz: Since you’ve been found out, you can’t stay here any longer. The next one will be coming along soon.

Reo: What have we done wrong? We only live a little longer than regular humans.

Franz: Anything unorthodox must be eliminated. That’s how humanity is.

-

Kota: Reo!

Reo: This is goodbye, Kota. I’m glad I met you.

Kota: I understand what’s going on now. There’s no need for you to leave!

Reo: Humans like you make even this mundane life worth living.

Kota: Are you just going to live alone like this again?

Reo: This is the fate of my kind.

Kota: ...then, take me with you. (this idiot is really out here on the ground opening his fucking collar i’m sorry i can’t take it here i’m lsoing my shit)

Reo: What...?

Kota: I’m saying I’ll keep you company. I’ll do anything, I’ll even become a vampire!

[winter telepathy time part 5] Azuma: (This distance that we haven’t...that we couldn’t break through until now...after bravely taking a step forward, I feel like we’ve become more connected to each other than ever before.)

Reo: ...Thank you, Kota. Just hearing you say that, I...

aaaand it goes into shoutai here. as always from the wiki

Reo, Kota The truth is I want to bite sweetly into the nape of your neck, and play with the red blood that flows forth Though my instincts may howl for release, I have kept them held back deep inside me If I hated you any more than I do, I would have long taken everything from you To the point that my throat runs dry, my heart has thirsted for it Listening to the tender echo of your sleeping breaths I have begun to learn what it means to fear loneliness

Reo Laughing at myself for letting a human grow on me I walk out into the depths of darkness all alone

(here i genuinely think that reo doesn’t actually bite kota again like he does in the original? like, he just kinda knocks him out and leaves his coat over him like a blanket. which makes me ??!?!!?? like...it feels like it’s really driving home the whole idea that reo doesn’t want to hurt him any more than he already has and i’m bbbhgbhhhb   ok)

Reo: Good night, and sweet dreams...

-

Nonomiya: Hey. Hey! Are you alive? Seo-chan?! (SEO-CHAN????????????)

Kota: ...h.

Nonomiya: What, you just overslept? You had me worried since you didn’t show up to work.

Kota: (running around the room) Where’s Reo?

Nonomiya: Reo? (picks up the jacket on the floor) What’s this?

Kota: (clutching the jacket in tears) He...left me behind... (HE STARTS SOBBING ON THE FLOOR)

Nonomiya: Are you okay...? Hey...

(while kota is sobbing on the floor you can see reo at the top part of the stage staring forlornly at the whole thing. i hate it here so much)

Kota: That idiot...

(it’s in the actual show, i don’t know why it’s not included in the soundtrack? ig bc it’s like...an adlib in-universe but so is sagishima’s thing about being fond of shiki and that’s on the soundtrack. idk man. thanks for reading the vampire gays.)

[kendrixtermina]

Actual Nightmares I have had of you

The human subconscious is profoundly weird

I.

Call me Kronos‘ Daughter; Daughter-of-Saturn.  

I’m never asked you to be my friend; You needn’t even like me. All I ever wanted is that you leave me be. Live and let live. That’s all it ever expected, that’s what my heart still screams from its depths down to its very bottom. But you wouldn’t, neither you nor the schoolyard bullies who came like sharks to pick and suck at the bloody marks you left on me.

I come home from that and it takes me a while to realize the thickness in the air. Slowly but steadily it dawns on me when no one responds and coldness meets me from all fronts.

My mother and siblings make sure to communicate their wrath through my slow understanding, and I scramble to piece together what I did wrong.

I was never good at understanding what displeased people; Wretchedly I ask for an explanation., but the answer is always:

“You know what you did” like my uncertainty is just a guise that only adds to the insult.

What was it? What did I do?

I can’t lose the last and only people that have the least bit concern for me.

Then after a while, it crystallized:

You have once again told lies about me;

You did it often enough for it to haunt me into my dreams; Somehow, that scarred me more than the beatings ever did. Somehow, at some point, I must have displeased the fickle volcano god and now it’s my turn to be flung down the crater, but that’s beside the point:  

I have no love to call my own.

I have no love – at any point, you could go behind my back and take it away as you please.

No one will ever believe me. You will go behind my back, and I can do nothing other than helpless, clueless fumbling like a bee caught in jelly and trying to fly through it, dead stop at the glass of the window.

You once claimed I had rudely dared to snub you as you drove by in your very generic red little car in the most common color there is. For months I felt my hairs standing on ends all the twelve bazillion times I saw a little red care, careful, careful! It might be you, and you might get displeased.

II.

We are walking down a wide street in the old part of some European city; We were simply wont to check out the historic streets whenever we went someone new.

But through we stand on ordinary cobblestone, the buildings left and right are comprised of stark black sharp alien shapes, warped curves of dark spikes pointing everywhere, crawling their way up like whimsical paper cutouts or shock-frosted currents, in place of ordinary rows and houses.

You keep my hand clamped up tight; No use protesting that I’m already eighteen.

The sharp shapes branch forward of the walls like metal flames or dark trees; Afterwards I’d wonder if this is the physical shape that might be taken by fear and hatred if they could harden into solids like ice rock and metal.

I remember this plan to mark a dumping site for nuclear waste to that residents of the far fure would understand that it’s dangerous and not get the impression that here’s something exciting to dig upon – one of the ideas they considered was filling a field with wide spikes poking out of the floor, like the places you’re not supposed to stand on in a video game:

‘This is no place of honor.

Nothing valuable lies here’

Nothing valuable is buried in my soul in the oppressive shadow of your presence. Apart from the spike houses this has been a very boring dream. I’ve had much more exciting ones far away from our kitchens or living rooms, and if I’m in them at all I can never recall filling this strong shame.

We reach a sort of view platform, we look down through a black front of glass, square reflective windows, out over the boulevard of thorns.  You’re sour and grumpy, you’re shouting at everyone, and everyone throws death glares at me. This happens often enough for the instances to blend into a generic good of pain and shame.

Mother scolds me scornfully at some point.

III.

It’s like I can feel you coming long before you do. It’s like you drop the temperature when you come into a room.

You were there, laughing at me in my sleep, I tried to calm myself down and shrug it off because I was meaning to enjoy the day, and there you are: The next day, my mother saw it fit to invite you to my birthday celebration. I’m not sure if I explicitly made it clear that you were not to be invited, I thought it was obvious, I didn’t want to be the one to dredge it out and taint a joyful occasion with pain and regret.

I wanted to go to a fucking cafe with my bloody family, can’t I have that?

You don’t even have to do anything for a scene to be caused; I do you the honor myself, you’ve pavlov trained me pretty well, monkey see, monkey fear. Like clockwork.

It’s like being locked in a cage with a saber-tooth tiger.

I can only stand it because I downed a glass of wine first thing before the entree.

And I curse myself all the way back: I should have known! I should have known! Why didn’t I say anything?

IV.

This dream was actually interesting, right where you showed up.

I’m driving a car, but because I don’t know what that’s like it’s more like a go-cart or a tricycle, or a bumper car from the fun-fair. There’s a lot of sudden acceleration and I’m needing my feet to keep myself steady in the seat.

You come in through some memory of driving out into the country up a mountain, and of a building that’s like an abbey or a castle where you used to work. Or maybe it’s just a hospital and I’m tripping over your existence because you worked in a different one, or it’s that visit to a mountaintop restaurant that was splendid apart from the fact that you were there.

There’s a hospital on the mountaintop, or that sort of complicated building, but when I look past the precipices, held only by a strange gravity that seems to be coming from the cliff face, I see not the valley but a folded landscape, with houses and church towers but also house-like structures in crystalline fractal squares.

I could pat my subconscious on the back for this one, were it not that after I drove home, coming back, somehow, to my second apartment and the bed of my ex-boyfriend, and as soon as I lie down, you burst open the door and start screaming and complaining about all that I did wrong.

In the shadows it’s my bedroom where I’m a naked adult woman but where the light touches there linger echos of my childhood bedroom with its metal bunk bed that my ex-boyfriend surely wouldn’t have fit it, my rugs, and certainly its door.

You come and scream and barge in because you’ve never respected a closed door in your life, in into my dwelling which ought to have been mine and a place that you can’t come inside.

You never came there safe in my dreams, not in all the four years I lived there,

and yet I sat there raging and naked and pleading with all that is right and wonder, how is it that you’re still allowed to come here now that I have my own life? How is it that you’re still allowed to haunt me well into my adulthood and all my sacred spaces?

How is it that you get to loose your spitting mouth and tell me all I’m doing wrong in my own damn house?

And I awake with a chill lodged in my spine.

I don’t actually have these dreams of you very often, you know, but when I do, you can bet that I’ll be useless for most of the morning, if not the entire day. There'll be a dark cloud hanging over my mood and all attempts at concentration come up frazzled. Sometimes I can will myself to do something out of sheer spite but its never as romantic as advertized and I have to remind myself, quite forcibly, that this doesn’t mean that nothing I did to get over your splendid childcare through my wonderful teenage years wasn’t entirely worthless or that I’m not stronger at all.

At some point it stopped feeling like that – it’s just annoying.

I don’t want to be mad, not even that, not anymore, I just want to be twenty-something.

Why do you get to eat my days still, while doing nothing? You’re probably working on some island in the north seas right now, some gray old man I’d hardly recognize.

My face in the mirror looks like the you I actually remember. I smear it full of makeup so it doesn’t.

V.

I’m laying somewhere, I don’t know, a bed, a couch; For some reason there’s christmas decorations on. Maybe it’s taken from a memory, some old half buried fragment of our one-time living room.

Then you come and there is screaming.

I don’t remember how because somehow, in some way, when you come there is always screaming. I think I was idly chatting with my siblings just before but that doesn’t matter because all that disintegrates, and you come, lumbering half-bald boxer-shorts-clad ogre that you are, and somehow, through some excuse, you mock my fearful measly little flesh as you hold me down, and deeper than your hands beat the spiked flails of your words.

I don’t have the courage to hold against you in earnest, marvelously concerned that you’ll break my little heart.

I slap your face and you overtake with with your violence,

I spit back taunts and you eviscerate me in humiliation.

I quote Melville in your face, and I can’t get it right, my stumbling words accomplish little more than to make you laugh.

I spit my last breath into hell’s heart and can’t seem to stab at anything despite the hate that only boils my veins.

I spread my legs in your face, in the hope that the smell will make you back off in shock, but it only confirms all you’ve ever thought of me, and I scream helpless beneath your blows:

“Just leave me alone! Just leave me alone!

You may beat me, mock me, debase me, as long as you leave me alone!”

I cry in desperation:

“Just leave me alone!”

Leave me alone.

Thanks to you, that’s all I ever asked of people. 

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Costumes Quotes

Official Website: Costumes Quotes

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• A film is a great deal about what you see, and the silhouette of a character tells you a lot. I’d love to go into film costume. – Clemence Poesy • A friend of mine was asked to a costume ball a short time ago. He slapped some egg on his face and went as a liberal economist. – Ronald Reagan • A lot of movies try to set up a world with cool sets, costumes, camera work. In Brick, the world is born from the words. – Joseph Gordon-Levitt • A producer has to know all about everything from set-building to costumes to acting – Alan Ladd • A screenplay is really an instruction manual, and it can be interpreted in any number of ways. The casting, the choice of location, the costumes and make-up, the actors’ reading of a line or emphasis of a word, the choice of lens and the pace of the cutting – these are all part of the translation. – David Nicholls • A simple garb is the proper costume of the vulgar; it is cut for them, and exactly suits their measure, but it is an ornament for those who have filled up their lives with great deeds. I liken them to beauty in dishabille, but more bewitching on that account. – Jean de la Bruyere • A woman in the depths of despair proves so persuasive that she wrenches the forgiveness lurking deep in the heart of her lover. This is all the more true when that woman is young, pretty, and so decollete as to emerge from the neck of her gown in the costume of Eve. – Honore de Balzac • Acting is not my favourite thing. I don’t like wearing costumes and wigs. – Victoria Wood • All through my life what I’ve loved doing is watching movies. I love the escapism of film, I love stories. So it is incredible to be able to be in them as much as I am, to see them from the first stitch in a costume to the end product. – Keira Knightley • And that’s when I realized, when you’re a kid you don’t need a costume, you ARE superman. – Jerry Seinfeld • And weren’t, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren’t. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and and playing guitar at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow. – Neil Gaiman • Another thing I take issue with are people who take their dogs on “play dates,” or even worse, people who choose to dress their dogs up in outfits better suited for homosexuals participating in a gay pride parade. Dog costumes are right up there with something else I find particularly offensive: sweater vests. – Chelsea Handler • Any time you talk about the look of the film, it’s not just the director and the director of photography. You have to include the costume designer and the production designer. – Spike Lee • As a costume designer, it’s important to give each person his or her own personalized look. – Eric Daman • As a rule, I try to avoid the French Quarter because of the crowds, especially Bourbon Street. But hey, some people love it. A great, wild, adult thing to see is the costume competition in front of the bar Oz on Bourbon early morning on Fat Tuesday. – Bryan Batt • As I wouldn’t wear a costume, I couldn’t imagine him wanting to wear one. And seeing that the greater part of my wardrobe is black (It’s a sensible colour. It goes with anything. Well, anything black)[…]. – Neil Gaiman

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Costume', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_costume').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_costume img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Calvin: Trick or treat! Adult: Where’s your costume? What are you supposed to be? Calvin: I’m yet another resource-consuming kid in an overpopulated planet, raised to an alarming extent by Madison Avenue and Hollywood, poised with my cynical and alienated peers to take over the world when you’re old and weak… Am I scary, or what? – Bill Watterson • Cause a costume can be comfortable It can make you feel more beautiful It can even make you look like someone else But it’s still you, so there’s nothing you can do Like a bad habit, the one you couldn’t kick, there it always is And it’s nothing that no doctor’s gonna fix. – Conor Oberst • Celebrate your success and find humor in your failures. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Loosen up and everyone around you will loosen up. Have fun and always show enthusiasm. When all else fails, put on a costume and sing a silly song. – Sam Walton • Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story. – Mason Cooley • Costume design is so important and really helpful, and I really love that aspect of character development, just figuring it out. – Katherine Waterston • Costume designers don’t care about trends. They appreciate, above so many other qualities, that tailoring is everything, which is a mantra for the way I dress. Ladies: The most important thing in clothing is to find a good, inexpensive tailor, because clothes at the stores are made for bodies that are anomalies. – Ginnifer Goodwin • Costume is a huge part of getting into character. Your body soaks in what you’re wearing, and you turn into someone else. – Jane Levy • Costume jewelry is not made to give women an aura of wealth, but to make them beautifu – Coco Chanel • Costumes and scenery alone will not attract audiences. – Anna Held • Costumes are fun. Dress up like a pilot some night and watch as people stare! – Tim Heidecker • Costumes are so much better than clothes. They’re like drugs, they change your personality. – Mary Woronov • Costumes are the first impression that you have of the character before they open their mouth-it really does establish who they are. – Colleen Atwood • Costumes, fashion, it’s all an expression of self, and the more you push the boundaries – the more that people work at creating alternative ideas – the more it changes people’s ideas of beauty. – Reese Witherspoon • Courtrooms contain every symbol of authority that a set designer could imagine. Everyone stands up when you come in. You wear a costume identifying you as, if not quite divine, someone special. – Irving Kaufman • Debased men, but they all had something in common: They showed a keen regard for virtue, and tried to dress themselves in that costume. Hypocrisy, for all its bad reputation, at least showed a decent respect for goodness. – Orson Scott Card • Diplomacy is the police in grand costume. – Napoleon Bonaparte • does you costume involve leather?” she’d asked. and he’d said, “Actually, yeah, it might.” it really did. it involved a leather dog collar, leather pants and a leash, and the leash was held by Ysandre, who was in skintight red rubber, from neck to knee high boots. she’d topped it off with a pair of devil horns and a red tridant. she’d made Shane her dog, complete with furry dog mask. ***”Breathe,” Myrnin said. “I’m not much for it myself, but i hear it’s quite good for humans.”*** – Rachel Caine • Drag for me is costume, and what I’m trying to do is, sometimes I’ll go around and wear makeup in the streets, turn up to the gig, take the makeup off, do the show, and then put the makeup back on. It’s the inverse of drag. It’s not about artifice. It’s about me just expressing myself. So when I’m campaigning in London for politics, I campaign with makeup on and the nails. It’s just what I have on, like any woman. – Eddie Izzard • Each character represents a different color on the big palette of what this ultimate painting is going to look like, who your guy is, and just try to be as honest and simple and real as you can possibly be. The outer trappings are incidental – costumes, period, makeup – all of that is rather insignificant at the end of the day. – Ron Perlman • Every day each of us wakes up, reaches into drawers and closets, pulls out a costume for the day and proceeds to dress in a style that can only be called preposterous. – Mary Schmich • Every year, I have to spend another hour working out. Pretty soon I’ll be spending eight hours working out just to fit in the costume. I have the feeling that the minute I stop doing the character, boom, Roseanne Barr. – Cassandra Peterson • Everyone goes to the ‘Grands-Boulevards’ (in Paris, ed.) and let himself loose… …Do not picture these in costume, they are not for the most part… …perhaps a clown with a big nose, or two girls with bare necks and short skirts… …the parade of the queens of the halls (markets) is also one of the events… …Some are pretty but look awkward in their silk dresses and crowns, particularly as the broad sun displays their defects – perhaps a neck too thin or a painted face which shows ghastley white in the sunlight. – Edward Hopper • Fashion offers no greater challenge than finding what works for night without looking like you are wearing a costume. – Vera Wang • Figure skating is theatrical, and a part of it is wearing costumes. My costumes were very over-the-top and outrageous for figure skating. But for me, it’s all beautiful. Even when nobody else believed they were beautiful, I felt beautiful in them. – Johnny Weir • For each human being there is an optimum ratio between change and stasis. Too little change, he grows bored. Too little stability, he panics and loses his ability to adapt. One who marries six times in ten years won’t change jobs. One who moves often to serve his company will maintain a stable marriage. A woman chained to one home and family may redecorate frantically or take a lover or go to many costume parties. – Larry Niven • For the kind of thing that we were showing, the budget was sufficient. As we were speaking of in Haiti, we had not done that before in exactly this form and we had to have costumes for it. – Katherine Dunham • Fresh from a costume fitting, where I had been posing in front of the mirror assuming what I thought was a strong position – arms folded, butch-looking…you know – I met with the woman in charge of Holloway police station. She gave me the most invaluable advice: never let them see you cry, and never cross your arms. When I asked why, she said ‘because it is a defensive action and therefore weak. – Helen Mirren • Get my swan costume ready. – Anna Pavlova • Halloween is my favorite holiday, and I always go all-out with my costumes. – Ginnifer Goodwin • History, we know, is apt to repeat itself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume. – George Eliot • I always go into a blocking rehearsal with an anchor, with a blocking plan. And sometimes they’ll step into the room and they’ll be in costume and you’re like, “That sucks, that’s not going to work. Let’s think of something new.” – Ava DuVernay • I am interested in costume. Clothes in your daily life are important: your choices say something about you, even if what they’re saying is about non-choice. And what you wear in a film is crucial. – Clemence Poesy • I am out in public and using the phone. I am in a phone booth, got the phone in my hand and a man taps on the glass and says You using the phone? Nope, I’m superman, i am just looking for my costume. Here’s your sign! – Bill Engvall • I am very sorry if I have caused any offence. It was a poor choice of costume. – Prince Harry • I believe that God—if he exists at all—is what we want him to be. The true God is unknowable, and so we dress him up in costumes that make him visible to us. Then we come up with a lot of very silly rules that we attribute to him and tell everyone if they don’t follow those rules, they can’t be part of the gang. – Michael Thomas Ford • I can still fit into my Battlestar Galactica costume! – Dirk Benedict • I consider myself an artist, but instead of paint or clay, my medium is drag. I put so much of myself into my drag from every detail of the costume, makeup and hair to my performance, the way I speak or even stand. – Manila Luzon • I definitely feel, when I’m wearing the costume, that I could scare people and hurt them. – Joan Severance • I design all of my costumes. I like to go out there and feel like I have contributed to every part of what I do. I choose the music, the choreographer, I’ve obviously chosen my coach, my costumes – all if that falls under my realm of power, my realm of influence. – Johnny Weir • I don’t believe in fashion. I believe in costume. Life is too short to be same person every day. – Stephanie Perkins • I don’t think I ever said, “I want to be an actress.” But for Halloween, I dressed up as a movie star from when I was seven to when I was twelve. The costume was always a long dress, with makeup, and my hair curled, and jewelry on. And the movie star was always Jenny McCarthy. So right there you could see a little pattern. – Jenny McCarthy • I don’t think that I could fit into the costume anymore. – Lee Meriwether • I dressed up as a veterinarian for a Halloween costume party. I had the lab coat. I got a couple of stuffed animals for patients and put bandages on them. – Tracy Chapman • I felt like, in the recent past, people have been apologizing for Superman, a little bit, for his costume, for his origins, and for the way he fits into society. – Zack Snyder • I firmly believe lyrics have to breathe and give the audience’s ear a chance to understand what’s going on. Particularly in the theater, where you have costume, story, acting, orchestra. – Stephen Sondheim • I gradually work myself into a frenzy as the shoot approaches, while we’re choosing the costumes or working with the make-up artist. I’m not so much interested in my character as the film itself. – Jeanne Moreau • I had a lot of fun with my costume designer. – Adam Lambert • I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added. – Louise Glück • I hate bananas. I just hate them. But I also think a banana suit is the funniest fruit costume a person can wear. – Paul Neilan • I hate Halloween. I hate dressing up. I hate – I wear wigs, makeup, costumes every day. Halloween is like, my least favorite holiday. – Amy Poehler • I hate Technicolor. Everybody in a Technicolor movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid costume in each new scene and to stand around like a clotheshorse with a lot of very green trees or very yellow wheat or very blue ocean rolling away for miles and miles in every direction. – Sylvia Plath • I hate the terminology of “costume” because my clothes are not costumes at all. I think they’re high fashion, avant-garde, and more couture, definitely, and yes, some of my pieces are not particularly wearable, but I wouldn’t say they’re costumes, I’d say they’re more couture. – Christian Siriano • I have a ton of cousins on my moms side of the family, and we would put on shows together all the time and put on costumes, and we even charged our parents money. – Maulik Pancholy • I have been interested in fashion since I was a kid. Then I lived in London, where it was more about costume and a personal statement of who you are than about fashion. – Zaha Hadid • I have friends who wear Star Wars costumes and act like the characters all day. I may not be that deep into it, but there’s something great about loving what you love and not caring if it’s unpopular. – Kristen Bell • I have over five thousand costumes and props and cars, and I have a twenty-five thousand square foot warehouse full of memorabilia. – Debbie Reynolds • I just love doing costume dramas; I am very lucky, as I see myself as a part-time time traveller. – Julia Sawalha • I knew ‘Be Our Guest’ would be performed on a set and in costume, but anyone with a history in Theatre In Education will know that can mean anything. – Pippa Evans • I knew I would grow up and wear a costume one day, and that’s exactly what happened. – Cassandra Peterson • I like that totally mixed up kind of eclectic group of personal props and bits of costume and I think the fun of doing that is where I was very lucky with Doctor Who. – Lalla Ward • I like to work in costumes, makeup, and hair that allow me tremendous freedom. – Jessica Lange • I liked the choreography, but I didn’t care for the costumes. – Tommy Tune • I love all the voiceovers I do. I can’t remember them all, but I seem to do them all of the time. And there’s nothing easier because you just stand and read the script, and you don’t have to act the way actors do. You don’t have to be made up and put costumes on. – Stan Lee • I love costumes. I love getting dressed up because it really helps my imagination make the leap to believe that I am who I say I am. – Alessandro Nivola • I love costumes. My dream growing up was always to have my own costume and prop shop. – Amy Sedaris • I love fashion. I always have. When I was a kid, I was in almost full-on costumes when I went to school, and I’ve retained a bit of that in my adulthood. – Lake Bell • I love putting on an outfit or a costume and just looking at myself in the mirror. Baggy pants or some real funky shoes and a hat and just feeling the character of it. That’s fun to me. – Michael Jackson • I loved doing all those costume dramas. I didn’t think, ‘Ooh I’ve got to avoid being typecast’ – you can’t ever be dictated to by what other people think. I just do things because I fancy the parts and the directors. – Helena Bonham Carter • I only assumed those dresses were costumes, based on the garish nature of the plumage. – Kami Garcia • I picked out my Halloween costume. I’m going as ‘Slutty Madeleine Albright.’ – Conan O’Brien • I put the costume on and said ‘It’s not very comfortable, but it looks amazing,’ so it’s all good. – Chris Hemsworth • I read and watch movies. I can’t go to the movie theater much anymore, though, because I get recognized. It’s worse sometimes if I wear a costume and try not to get recognized. I watch most of my films on airplanes – Ayumi Hamasaki • I realized that I wanted to play characters and do traditional theatre. I wanted to make believe again. I like putting on a costume and pretending to be someone else for a few hours, and I have a great respect for playwrights. – Lusia Strus • I remember playing football dressed in peculiar costumes with some friends in France and laughing so hard we couldn’t even stand up, let alone kick the ball. – Fred Frith • I said old Jesus probably would’ve puked if He could see it – all those fancy costumes and all. Sally said I was a sacrilegious atheist. I probably am. The thing Jesus really would’ve liked would be the guy who plays the kettle drums in the orchestra. – J. D. Salinger • I see my face in the mirror and go, ‘I’m a Halloween costume? That’s what they think of me?’ – Drew Carey • I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes. – Anais Nin • I thank you for your kind invitation to introduce me to the president of the Republic. Since I have not been out of my atelier for two months, I have no appropriate costume for this circumstance. Please excuse me. – Camille Claudel • I think color, for a costume designer, is one of your biggest storytelling devices. – Alexandra Byrne • I think I’m better at live shows than I used to be because I’m way more comfortable with the uncomfortable pauses between songs. Now, rather than trying to talk or do a costume change, I’ll use those moments for myself. I listen to what other people are playing, or just rest, or dance, even though I don’t know how to. – Fiona Apple • I think of clothes a lot like costumes. I think of what I wear in real life as being my real life character’s costume. – Ginnifer Goodwin • I think people feel starved of nice, glamorous entertainment. They want to see costumes and gaiety and a singer; old-fashioned entertainment – it won’t die easily. – Ronnie Corbett • I think that when you put yourself, as actors have to do, in other people’s shoes, when you have to put on the costume that someone else has worn in their life, it gets much, much harder to be prejudiced against them and even to be – to not try to look at the world in a sense of “I’m not going to judge somebody. I’m going to try to understand who they are and what they’re about.” – Kevin Spacey • I tried to end our little duel. I called out pacifying words; I entreated; I finally surrendered. Still Clyde came, my pirate costume so great a success that it had apparently convinced him that we were back in the golden days of romantic old New Orleans when gentlemen decided matters of hot dog honor at twenty paces – John Kennedy Toole • I try to get to know the actors as much as I can. I feel like I’m friends with them for starters and for a week or two, we rehearse when they’re getting the costumes together. – Gus Van Sant • I try very hard not to take work home, but it can be tricky. Sometimes it feels as if you are wearing your costume underneath your own clothes! I suppose things are always ticking away in the back of your mind. – Anne-Marie Duff • I wanna begin saying a story about my son. I have a four-year old son who loves superheroes from Spider-Man to Iron Man to Batman. He’s got all the costumes. One day he looks at me and says ‘Dad, I want to be light-skinned so I could be Spider-Man. Spider-Man has light skin.’ That was sort of a shock. This is why I am excited to be a part of the Marvel Universe, so I could be hopefully provide that diversity in the role of the superhero. – Djimon Hounsou • I want to create things while I have time on Earth, and the art of costume and culture has always inspired me. – Johnny Weir • I was obsessed with being popular when I was in high school and never achieved it. There’s photos from our high school musicals and things, and I’m comically in the deep background, wearing a beggar’s costume. – Mindy Kaling • I will confess I did none of my own singing. I did all my own costume and makeup, though. – Gary Cole • I would love to play the Femme Fatale or an action role like Trinity in the Matrix or something like that. You know, a part with a lot of costume changes. – Josie Maran • I’d hear some beautiful Sade or Kings Of Convenience ballad remixed in a club and I liked that these simple little songs seemed to be masquerading. They had put on superhero costumes, got all beefy, and here they were on the dancefloor. I was interested in that. I can’t make electronic beats, so I leave it to the pros like Boys Noize and Chromeo. – Feist Ideas, Possums, Officers • If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up? – Chuck Palahniuk • If human beings had genuine courage, they’d wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. – Douglas Coupland • If I’ve learned anything in twenty-nine years, it’s that every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that’s sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar. My gift – bad choice of words – is that I can look at you, him, her, them, whoever, and tell right away what is keeping them awake at night: money; feelings of insignificance; overwhelming boredom; evil children; job troubles; or perhaps death, in one of its many costumes, perched in the wings. What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives. – Douglas Coupland • If Jacob was right and clothes were costumes and makeup a mask, then our attitudes and habits must be our shields. – Justina Chen • I’ll tell you…why Wonder Woman worked. Or Bionic Woman. Or any of those [shows] really. It was because it wasn’t about brawn…it was about brains. And yes, she happened to be beautiful, she happened to be kind of extraordinary in some way, but she wasn’t a guy. And I think that, [now], they…put out a female hero, and all they are doing is changing the costume from a man to a woman…they’re not showcasing any of the tremendous dichotomies than women possess in term of softness and toughness, sweetness and grit, inner and outer strength. – Lynda Carter • I’m a big comic book nerd so every time I’m in costume and see everyone in costume I’m just like “This is sick.” – Franz Drameh • I’m a child of the downloading age. I remember when I was 10, a friend who went to the same school as me came to our [school’s] costume party with a really weird hairdo. She had all these little knots in her hair. I asked her who she was and she said she was Björk. I thought this Björk must be a really cool person, so I got on the internet when I got home and found as much as I could on Björk and I fell in love. – Tove Styrke • I’m a fiend for costume jewellery and have countless pairs of rhinestone or diamante earrings, which are so flattering when they catch the light. I love the designers Alexis Bittar and Kenneth Jay Lane, and I always go to jewellers Butler & Wilson. – Joan Collins • I’m a pain in the ass to all of the costume designers with whom I work because I have very strong feelings about the subject. – Meryl Streep • Im able to hang up the character with the costume at the end of the movie. – Kevin Spacey • I’m glad I was born when I was. My time was the golden age of variety. If I were starting out again now, maybe things would happen for me, but it certainly would not be on a variety show with 28 musicians, 12 dancers, two major guest stars, 50 costumes a week by Bob Mackie – the networks just wouldn’t spend the money today. – Carol Burnett • I’m not the best audience for that because I’m not a great science-fiction fan. I just never got off on space ships and space costumes, things like that. – Gary Oldman • I’m sure favorite moments in movies are things that just happen accidentally when the camera is there. You have to do all the homework to get yourself into the period, the costumes, the style, the voice, the hairdo or whatever it is, but once you’ve done all that work, you have to kind of let it go and just be there. If you’re always thinking about it, it just looks a bit over-thought. – Tom Hiddleston • I’m sure that there must have been times when you have read books or watched films and found yourself secretly wishing for the villain to win. Why? Isn’t that against the rules by which our society lives? Why should you feel this way? It’s simple, really; the villain is the true hero of these tales, not the well-intentioned moron who somehow foils their diabolical scheme. The villain get’s all the best lines, has the best costumes, has unlimited power and wealth- why on earth would anyone not want to be the villain? – Mark Walden • I’m very good at living out of a suitcase. I love dressing up every morning. It feels like a costume, in some ways. – Morgan Saylor • I’m very much into the costuming of any character that I portray and it’s one of the great things about making movies is it’s a collaborative art form so you get all these artists who are looking specifically about for this instance your character’s costume and what that might tell about your character. – Jeff Bridges • Immortals is without doubt the best-looking awful movie you will ever see. Eiko Ishioka’s costume designs alone deserve an Oscar nomination. “They weren’t at all historically accurate,” grumbled a woman in the elevator after the sneak preview, as if lots of documentation exists about the wardrobes of the gods. She added: “I guess that’s what we deserve for using free tickets we got at a Blackhawks game. – Roger Ebert • In a costume, you need very exaggerated body language – as you say, sort of mime-type skills. – Warwick Davis • In dreams we are true poets; we create the persons of the drama; we give them appropriate figures faces, costumes; they are perfect in their organs, attitudes, manners; moreover they speak after their own characters, not ours; and we listen with surprise to what they say. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • In general, costumes are the first thing in life that let other people know who we are. They indicate who the person is without saying anything. – Molly Parker • In some ways, Halloween is much easier for women. They can just dress as sluts, and it’s kind of a costume, if they never do any other time. – Chuck Klosterman • In the old days when I first was coming up, you would turn up on set in the morning with your coffee, script, and hangover and you would figure out what you were going to do with the day and how you were going to play the scenes. You would rehearse and then invite the crew in to watch the actors go through the scenes. The actors would go away to makeup and costume and the director and the DP would work out how they were going to cover what the actors had just done. – Paul Bettany • Inside the envelope with the letter was a little Princess Leia action figure USB flash drive. For me to store my novel on, since he was right – I never back up my computer’s hard drive. The sight of it – it’s Princess Leia in her Hoth outfit, my favorite of her costumes (how had he remembered?) brought tears to my eyes. – Meg Cabot • It is a process of finding the right music then planning a costume to fit that style of music. – Nancy Kerrigan • It is amazing to me how deeply into the popular culture the creature has become. There are zombie walks in every major city. I live in Toronto, and last year 3,000 people came out dressed as zombies…. I do not get it. Maybe it’s an easy costume: Splash some ketchup on and rip up your jeans — although most people already have torn jeans — and you’re done. – George A. Romero • It is only in the case of the Priestly Code that opinions differ widely; for it tries hard to imitate the costume of the Mosaic period, and, with whatever success, to disguise its own. – Julius Wellhausen • It reminds me of how grandmother always had the right costume for me to wear. You wear the right outfit and you feel like the person you’re pretending to be. – John Boyne • It took me a while to warm to the ’20s costumes on ‘Downton.’ I love it when women accentuate their curves, and that era was all about hiding them. The shapes they wore then were in tune with female empowerment. Cutting off their hair and hiding their busts was a way of saying, ‘We’re equal to men!’ – Lily James • It was amazing that during rehearsals, without any of the costume on, the character was there complete. It just happened. Half the time, I didn’t know I was doing it. – Peter Mayhew • It was something I was more interested in myself. When I went to see my sister dance at ballet, I was really into costumes and the arts, and my family was also supportive of whatever me and my sister wanted to do. I would say I pushed myself the most to be into design. – Christian Siriano • It was the sheer variety of the pain that stopped me from crying out. It came from so many places, spoke so many languages, wore so many dazzling varieties of ethnic costume, that for a full fifteen seconds I could only hang my jaw in amazement. – Hugh Laurie • It’s an addiction. I love clothes. I like to go down Melrose and look in all the windows and I go to different flea markets. I have lots of costumes. You never know when you’re going to have to dress up like a milkmaid from the 1600s. – Zooey Deschanel • I’ve always been attracted to romantic secondhand clothes. But my style developed as I started going to these strange raves where everybody had these very definitive costumes. – Florence Welch • I’ve always been misrepresented. You know, I could dress in a clown costume and laugh with the happy people but they’d still say I’m a dark personality. – Tim Burton • I’ve always wanted to be Wonder Woman, of course. She had the greatest costume. – Kelly Hu • I’ve always worked closely with the designers and whoever’s making the costumes. Comfort is the last thing you want on your mind when you’re competing. In an ideal situation, you’ll have something where you’ll put it on and you’re fine and you don’t have to worry about it at all. – Kristi Yamaguchi • I’ve done a lot of costume drama and theatre – the National Theatre and In fact, most of my work at the theatre, at the National Theatre anyway, was period. – Brenda Blethyn • I’ve done approximately 15 films, and most of the things I’ve done have either been stunt or costume work. – Verne Troyer • I’ve made quite a number of movies like Castaway and a few others where I’m the only guy in the movie and the only place to be is right next to the camera in costume ready to go in order to get it. The years, and more specifically probably the four months prior to beginning shooting, is where the big preparation is that the director does because I knew we were going to get on the set. And the good news is, if you’re the boss, if it ain’t good, you don’t use it. You just cut it out. – Tom Hanks • I’ve never done a lead role in a film this big [like Doctor Strange], in a franchise this big. One of the reasons was, I wanted to know what the toy box was like. And it’s just insane, the amount of facility that everyone gets, but the amount of artistry and craft that’s brought to every aspect of filmmaking. I mean, you go to your first costume fitting and it’s one of thirty. It’s a myriad, but it’s for a reason. There are so many incredible costumes in this. – Benedict Cumberbatch • just because I don’t have on a silly black costume and carry a silly broom and wear a silly black hat, doesn’t mean that I’m not a witch. I’m a witch all the time and not just on Halloween. – E. L. Konigsburg • Madonna has a far profounder vision of sex than do the feminists. She sees both the animality and the artifice. Changing her costume style and hair color virtually every month, Madonna embodies the eternal values of beauty and pleasure. Feminism says, ‘No more masks.’ Madonna says we are nothing but masks. Through her enormous impact on young women around the world, Madonna is the future of feminism. – Camille Paglia • My book is very wild. But you know during the period of BATMAN, that there were thousands of Batman and Robin costumes sold and these weren’t just for kids. – Burt Ward • My costumes were made for sex appeal not for women. – Brenda Holloway • My fancy dress costume of choice is… something 1920s or 30s, when there was still so much elegance and attention to detail. An excuse for ultimate dressing-up indulgence. – Ellie Goulding • My father has developed a tradition of surprising us at some point by appearing in fancy dress. He buys a new costume each year and typically gets carried away. A couple of Christmases ago he appeared in an inflatable sumo outfit. Its endearing, really, and only quite embarrassing. – Pippa Middleton • My first acting experience was a non-speaking role as a robot. My costume was a cardboard box covered in tinfoil, but I was so shy I refused to go on stage. – Jessica Raine • My girlfriend’s a costume designer in the theater. – Philip Seymour Hoffman • My mom did costumes for the Pointer Sisters. – Slash • My mom used to make my costumes when I was little; she sews a lot. One year, I was a bride and I had a big wedding dress and a bouquet. Another year I was a medieval princess with a long teal dress and a veil. It was a little extravagant, but it was cute! – Sasha Pieterse • My neighbors tell me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilities they met at the dinner-table; but I am no more interested in such things than in the contents of the Daily Times. The interest and the conversation are about costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will. – Henry David Thoreau • My objects dream and wear new costumes, compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands and the sea that bangs in my throat. – Anne Sexton • Nice costume,” he said. “Ditto. I can tell you put alot of though into yours.” Amusement curled his mouth. “If you don’t like it, I can take it off.” I tapped my chin thoughtfully. “That just might be the best proposal I’ve had all night.” “My offers are always the best, Angel. – Becca Fitzpatrick • No matter how many modern parts I do, people still refer to me as Mrs. Costume Drama. – Helena Bonham Carter • No touching Baby Jesus.” “But we’re his parents!” proclaimed Mary Beth, who was being generous to include poor Joseph under this appellation. “Mary Beth,” Barb Wiggin said, “if you touch the Baby Jesus, I’m putting you in a cow costume. – John Irving • No, officer, I have no idea why I’m wearing this possum costume. I called you what? OH. My bad.” -Nastasya – Cate Tiernan • Nothings makes a woman look older that a rich costume. – Coco Chanel • Now people need special costumes to ride bicycles. I mean, a helmet, what, are you an astronaut?? – Fran Lebowitz • Now what else is the whole life of mortals, but a sort of comedy in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each ones part until the manager walks them off the stage? – Desiderius Erasmus • O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales. – Leo Rosten • Oh, hello,” Dr. M says, shaking Balder’s hand. “Wonderful costume. I’m a bit of a role player myself on the weekends. Tell me, where did you get the helmet?” It was forged in the North, blessed by the hands of Odin, given to me by my mother, Frigg,” Balder answers. Lovely. I got mine on the Internet. – Libba Bray • On the side of box of my superman costume it actually said – ‘Do not attempt to fly!’ – Jerry Seinfeld • Once you embody the language, the character comes really naturally, especially when you put the costume on. – Lucy Liu • One time I forgot my costume, and I had to do a scene in my pants, and I got my knob caught in a clapperboard. – 2D • People always seem to assume that we have a full, back-up support team – make-up, costume and a driver – but usually, in a war zone, there’s only me and the cameraman. – Kate Adie • People assume, because I’m Hef’s girlfriend, that I’m a Bunny and I’m a Playmate and I’m a centerfold, but they’re different things. If you’re a Playmate or a centerfold, which is the same thing, you pose for the magazine, you are one particular month, and not every Playmate is a Bunny. A Bunny is a girl who used to work at the Playboy Club, she had the Bunny costume, and now that we don’t have Playboy Clubs, it’s just Playmates who work special promotions and are fitted for a Bunny costume. – Holly Madison • Period costume films are fun to discover, but they’re not relatable. It’s more, ‘Wow, that’s cool – did it really look like that back then?’ Whereas with a comedy, you’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s me, that’s my friends.’ No matter what, I want people to relate. – Paul Feig • Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one side, and those who are still engaged in changing themselves, on the other. Agitators of arrested metamorphosis versus agitators of continued metamorphosis. The former have the advantage of numbers (since most people accept themselves as successes or failures quite early), the latter of vitality and visibility (since self-transformation, though it begins from within, with ideology, religion, drugs, tends to express itself publicly through costume and jargon). – Harold Rosenberg • pools of blood are not recreational even lifeguards drown when the undertow breaks bread with the underbelly demons disguised as sharks have not put enough thought into their costumes a wiseman stays ashore when pointed fins read like italian subtitles the end is near (…) the beginning – Saul Williams • Radio is truly the theater of the mind. The listener constructs the sets, colors them from his own palette, and sculpts and costumes the characters who perform in them. – Mercedes McCambridge • Satan himself can’t save a woman who wears thirty-shilling corsets under a thirty-guinea costume. – Rudyard Kipling • She said, “I’m going to have you fired.” I had two people say that to me today, “I’m going to have you fired.” Go ahead, be my guest. I’m wearing a green velvet costume; it doesn’t get any worse than this. Who do these people think they are? I’m going to have you fired!” and I wanted to lean over and say, “I’m going to have you killed. – David Sedaris • Shigure Sohma: [got Tohru a maid costume for White Day] I can’t wait to for her to call me master while wearing this. Hatsuharu Sohma: Just don’t get arrested, okay? – Natsuki Takaya • Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to a deed. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to deed. A skillful man reads his dreams for his self-knowledge; yet not the details, but the quality. What part does he play in them – a cheerful, manly part, or a poor, drivelling part? However monstrous and grotesque their apparitions, they have a substantial truth. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • So you couldn’t protect yourself? The absolute erodes; the boundary, the wall around the self erodes. If I was waiting I had been invaded by time. But do you think you’re free? I think I recognize the patterns of my nature. Bud do you think you’re free? I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added. – Louise Glück • So, did the costume come with a condom, or is that sold separately? – Rachel Vincent • Some directors hand over portions of their movie to their head of department to the point where it’s like, “I’m not going to talk to you about the costumes, but I’m going to let you talk to the expert.” Rather than, “You want to talk stitching, let’s talk stitching. You want to talk grade of leather? Let’s.” – Idris Elba • Someone’s going to put the clothes on you, and part of being an actor is wearing costumes. Costumes tell you an awful lot about who you are, so you just, it’s nothing. – Morgan Freeman • Sometimes I steal costumes. – Rich Fulcher • Steampunk is…the love child of Hot Topic and a BBC costume drama – Gail Carriger • Tales of adultery are much improved by period costumes. – Mason Cooley • The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. – Percy Bysshe Shelley • The costume designer designing clothes that helped the comedy in The Proposal, that sold the character. Each and every detail was so perfectly thought of, what wouldn’t be here? That’s a lost art. – Sandra Bullock • the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life. – Oscar Wilde • The costume of women should be suited to her wants and needs. – Amelia Bloomer • The costume that I wear on the show is a little snug and doesn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination. I don’t have a problem with it because of the way this character’s been written. – Jeri Ryan • The Dutch at close proximity looked much like Americans, apart from their peculiar uniforms, and so it was their uniforms I fired at, half convinced that I was killing, not human beings, but enemy costumes, which had borne their contents here from a distant land; and if some living man suffered for his enslavement to the uniform, or was penetrated by the bullets aimed at it well, that was unavoidable, and the fault couldn’t be placed at my feet. The private charade was not equivalent to Courage, but it enabled a Callousness that served a similar purpose. – Robert Charles Wilson • The fashion I’ve acquired over the years is so sacred to me – from costumes to couture, high fashion to punk wear I’ve collected from my secret international hot spots. I keep everything in an enormous archive in Hollywood. The clothes are on mannequins, also on hangers and in boxes with a photo of each piece, and there’s a Web site where I can go to look through everything. It’s too big – I could never sort through it myself! But these garments tell the stories of my life. – Lady Gaga • The first time I met Prince he invented me to his birthday party in Minneapolis. It was a costume party and I came as a beatnik – a beret and a charcoal goatee. He was dressed like an executioner. I talked to him for awhile and he didn’t know who I was, and when I told him he was real surprised. – Paul Reubens • The historical side of fashion was very attractive to me when I was a teenager in Moscow, working for the costume departments in various Russian theater companies. – Alexander Vassiliev • The Hulk was a unique character because of his strength and power. He doesn’t have a costume like Spiderman or like Superman – The Hulk is more visual. His passion and his strength, that is what separates him from anything else. – Lou Ferrigno • The kinds of things I like with crystals are the really beautiful costume jewelry, vintage pieces, and they usually have that diamond shape. – Zoe Kravitz • The only difference is that religion is much better organized and has been around much longer, but it’s the same story with different characters and different costumes. – James Randi • The skeptics said you can’t put on a costume in the middle of New York – which isn’t true, because everyone’s in a costume here. – Avi Arad • The tabloid that said that I dressed up as a medieval, like a sexy medieval something and that upset me more than the dating rumors that have been circling around that were fake. If somebody thinks I’m going to dress sexy to a costume party, they have another thing coming. – Jennifer Lawrence • The threats against democracy today are in general completely normal. They walk around in costume and tie. – Carl B. Hamilton • There is the danger of over preparation, of loss of spontaneity; over rehearsal is the most terrible thing you can imagine. We do have a very close association between costume and set designer, though. And the cameraman is very important, of course. – Terence Fisher • There’s going to be a Halloween costume [of lavash from Sausage Party]. The whole thing is just so ridiculous. It’s nice. It’s silly, and it’s surreal. – David Krumholtz • There’s no mystery to it. Nothing more complicated than learning lines and putting on a costume. – Morgan Freeman • There’s nothing more fun than putting on an old costume and jewelry and being in a house that’s decorated from the ’20s or ’30s or whatever. • There’s something about being there, on the set, in costume, in the moment, where you start to get a feel for the scene, which is not the same as sitting in your office writing it. – Lionel Wigram • They know they’re going to look beautiful, and I don’t think women should look like costumes. They shouldn’t look like fashion victims. – Ralph Lauren • They said they wanted a lot of feathers, glitter, colourful colours. A costume. So I had a lady here in Calgary make it. She just kind of put together what I had in mind. – Owen Hart • They take the paper and they read the headlines. So they’ve heard of unemployment and they’ve heard of bread-lines. And they philanthropically cure them all by getting up a costume charity ball. – Ogden Nash • This is my costume. I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everyone else. – Christina Ricci • To me, achieving tone, achieving consistency, is exactly the job of a director. It is to be the fusing, the nexus of a whole bunch of people contributing to the complex life of a movie. There are actors, there’s a cinematographer, there’re costume people, set people, there are all these things, and you somehow have to be the person in the middle of it who is making it all synchronize into the same magic bubble. – Edward Norton • To me, the appeal of opera lies in the fact that a myriad of singers and instruments, each possessed of different qualities of voice and sound, against the backdrop of a grand stage and beautiful costumes, come together in one complete and impressive drama. – Junichiro Koizumi • Vitamins ruined my life. Not that there was much left to ruin, but still. I know that blaming vitamins for my horrible life sounds strange. After all, vitamins are supposed to keep people healthy. Also, they’re inanimate objects. But thanks to them I was stuck in the Jackson Center Mall watching my father run around in a bee costume. – Elizabeth Scott • We have a costume closet at home. My family will put on a costume for any excuse. – Bryan Batt • We needed to have a great set decorator, a great D.P., a great costume designer, everybody. Without all these people, we would have made a shitty movie. – Vincent Paronnaud • We post photos of the Halloween costumes and the mustaches made of cupcake frosting. We don’t record the tantrums?and that’s as it should be. But we shouldn’t mistake that for reality. It’s stagecraft. – Libby Copeland • We talk about theatre museums filled with old costumes and things. What we also need is a theatre museum of the old routines on videotape. We are only the custodians of those techniques, and they should be preserved. – Jim Dale • We were a family that made our Halloween costumes. Or, more accurately, my mother made them. She took no suggestions or advice. Halloween costumes were her territory. She was the brain behind my brothers winning girl costume, stuffing her own bra with newspapers for him to wear under a cashmere sweater and smearing red lipstick on his lips. – Ann Hood • Well, I design costumes because I started with the theater in Chicago, but somehow a few lines just sort of fell to me to do it. And I studied it in school and I always liked it. – John Malkovich • Well,the fun part of being a writer is that it’s like making a wonderful film, with no limit on my budget. I can design the sets, the costume, the lightings, I write the script, and then I get to perform all the roles as I step into each character’s skin, zip up, and adopt that point of view. So, to me, they are all compelling and fascinating. – Robin Hobb • What keeps this industry alive is creators doing their own work. Once you change a costume or origin enough times, it’s a dead body – you’re just electrocuting it and keeping it sort of shambling on. There is a lot more creator-owned stuff now, and some of it I look at and go, ‘Oh, that’s his pitch for a TV show. That’s his pitch for a movie. That’s him saying oh, this kind of thing sells.’ I didn’t do that. – Mike Mignola • When all else fails, put on a costume and sing a silly song. – Sam Walton • When I get up in the morning, I go and I work with beautiful women and charming men and funny comedians and dramatic artists. And I’m presented with costumes and great music to choose from and sets. I travel a certain amount of places, so I’ve been living in a bubble. And I like it. – Woody Allen • When I go out and I’m presenting the best side of myself, I want to look different from everyone, but I don’t want it to look like I’m wearing a costume. – Rachel Roy • When the Strokes first started playing gigs, instead of getting into a costume for the shows, we talked about how we should dress every day, in real life, like we’re playing onstage. I don’t really care about clothes, but it’s about wearing something that gives you social confidence. Or maybe helps you pick up chicks. – Julian Casablancas • When you put your costume on and you get your hair and your makeup done [for a role] and you stare in the mirror you feel like a different person. – Michael Shannon • When you’re wearing an animal costume and something bad happens, your facial expression doesn’t change. The animal is deadpan the whole time. If you’re skiing in a gorilla suit and you fall, you just see a gorilla who has no emotion. It’s just a stoic gorilla, wildly falling down a hill, out of control. – Demetri Martin • When youre young, the blue blazer feels like a grown-up costume. – Willie Geist • White is too brilliant to be seen, so yellow is its filter, its costume, revealing that pure light has not only brightness but emotional resonance and depth. – Richard Grossinger • Wild Bill was a strange character, add to this figure a costume blending the immaculate neatness of the dandy with the extravagant taste and style of a frontiersman, you have Wild Bill, the most famous scout on the Plains. – George Armstrong Custer • Without my husband’s costumes I wouldn’t have known how to accomplish what I saw in my own mind’s eyes for choreography. And then seeing our choreography and knowing the background of it I am sure helped my husband a great deal with what he designed for us. – Katherine Dunham • Women: You can’t live with them, and you can’t get them to dress up in a skimpy little Nazi costume and beat you with a warm squash or something. – Emo Philips • You cannot climb the ladder of success dressed in the costume of failure. – Zig Ziglar • You can’t do a machine without knowing something about how it’s going to work. As for the romantics, the costumes bored me and I don’t enjoy doing period clothes. – Boris Vallejo • You can’t have a bad time at Disney World. It’s not allowed. They have hidden electronic surveillance cameras everywhere, and if they catch you failing to laugh with childlike wonder, they lock you inside a costume representing a beloved Disney character such as Goofy and make you walk about in the Florida heat getting grabbed and leaped on by violently excited children until you have learned your lesson. – Dave Barry • You know, being in a rock band, you can’t overdo the costume changes too much because everyone thinks, oh, that’s not a real rock band. Look how many times he changes costumes. That’s not rock. Rock’s about going on in a T-shirt and staying in it and getting it all dirty. But that’s not really my approach. – Mick Jagger • You look at Cheney, Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and Bush – if you saw them on Halloween, they wouldn’t need a costume. You’d give them a treat and compliment them on what great-looking demons they were. They are demons. There’s no doubt about it. – Tommy Chong • You men out there probably think you already know how to dress for success. You know, for example, that you should not wear leisure suits or white plastic belts and shoes, unless you are going to a costume party disguised as a pig farmer vacationing at Disney World. – Dave Barry • You only get one shot in your life and you might as well push yourself and try things. There’s so many interesting aspects of making a movie; the costume department, the set design, the casting itself, the locations. It’s a great, great thing to be involved in if you have the headspace for it, and I do. Try anything once. – Jason Statham • Young people, however, tend to ignore the customs of their elders. Adolescent rebellion has been responsible for all manner of absurd costumes. The more ridiculous a certain fashion is, the more adolescents will cling to it. – David Eddings • Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they’ve memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for the easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality. – Milan Kundera • Youve got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume – they need to know who the character is, what theyre like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play. – Kurt Busiek

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Official Website: Costumes Quotes

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• A film is a great deal about what you see, and the silhouette of a character tells you a lot. I’d love to go into film costume. – Clemence Poesy • A friend of mine was asked to a costume ball a short time ago. He slapped some egg on his face and went as a liberal economist. – Ronald Reagan • A lot of movies try to set up a world with cool sets, costumes, camera work. In Brick, the world is born from the words. – Joseph Gordon-Levitt • A producer has to know all about everything from set-building to costumes to acting – Alan Ladd • A screenplay is really an instruction manual, and it can be interpreted in any number of ways. The casting, the choice of location, the costumes and make-up, the actors’ reading of a line or emphasis of a word, the choice of lens and the pace of the cutting – these are all part of the translation. – David Nicholls • A simple garb is the proper costume of the vulgar; it is cut for them, and exactly suits their measure, but it is an ornament for those who have filled up their lives with great deeds. I liken them to beauty in dishabille, but more bewitching on that account. – Jean de la Bruyere • A woman in the depths of despair proves so persuasive that she wrenches the forgiveness lurking deep in the heart of her lover. This is all the more true when that woman is young, pretty, and so decollete as to emerge from the neck of her gown in the costume of Eve. – Honore de Balzac • Acting is not my favourite thing. I don’t like wearing costumes and wigs. – Victoria Wood • All through my life what I’ve loved doing is watching movies. I love the escapism of film, I love stories. So it is incredible to be able to be in them as much as I am, to see them from the first stitch in a costume to the end product. – Keira Knightley • And that’s when I realized, when you’re a kid you don’t need a costume, you ARE superman. – Jerry Seinfeld • And weren’t, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren’t. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and and playing guitar at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow. – Neil Gaiman • Another thing I take issue with are people who take their dogs on “play dates,” or even worse, people who choose to dress their dogs up in outfits better suited for homosexuals participating in a gay pride parade. Dog costumes are right up there with something else I find particularly offensive: sweater vests. – Chelsea Handler • Any time you talk about the look of the film, it’s not just the director and the director of photography. You have to include the costume designer and the production designer. – Spike Lee • As a costume designer, it’s important to give each person his or her own personalized look. – Eric Daman • As a rule, I try to avoid the French Quarter because of the crowds, especially Bourbon Street. But hey, some people love it. A great, wild, adult thing to see is the costume competition in front of the bar Oz on Bourbon early morning on Fat Tuesday. – Bryan Batt • As I wouldn’t wear a costume, I couldn’t imagine him wanting to wear one. And seeing that the greater part of my wardrobe is black (It’s a sensible colour. It goes with anything. Well, anything black)[…]. – Neil Gaiman

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Costume', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_costume').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_costume img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Calvin: Trick or treat! Adult: Where’s your costume? What are you supposed to be? Calvin: I’m yet another resource-consuming kid in an overpopulated planet, raised to an alarming extent by Madison Avenue and Hollywood, poised with my cynical and alienated peers to take over the world when you’re old and weak… Am I scary, or what? – Bill Watterson • Cause a costume can be comfortable It can make you feel more beautiful It can even make you look like someone else But it’s still you, so there’s nothing you can do Like a bad habit, the one you couldn’t kick, there it always is And it’s nothing that no doctor’s gonna fix. – Conor Oberst • Celebrate your success and find humor in your failures. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Loosen up and everyone around you will loosen up. Have fun and always show enthusiasm. When all else fails, put on a costume and sing a silly song. – Sam Walton • Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story. – Mason Cooley • Costume design is so important and really helpful, and I really love that aspect of character development, just figuring it out. – Katherine Waterston • Costume designers don’t care about trends. They appreciate, above so many other qualities, that tailoring is everything, which is a mantra for the way I dress. Ladies: The most important thing in clothing is to find a good, inexpensive tailor, because clothes at the stores are made for bodies that are anomalies. – Ginnifer Goodwin • Costume is a huge part of getting into character. Your body soaks in what you’re wearing, and you turn into someone else. – Jane Levy • Costume jewelry is not made to give women an aura of wealth, but to make them beautifu – Coco Chanel • Costumes and scenery alone will not attract audiences. – Anna Held • Costumes are fun. Dress up like a pilot some night and watch as people stare! – Tim Heidecker • Costumes are so much better than clothes. They’re like drugs, they change your personality. – Mary Woronov • Costumes are the first impression that you have of the character before they open their mouth-it really does establish who they are. – Colleen Atwood • Costumes, fashion, it’s all an expression of self, and the more you push the boundaries – the more that people work at creating alternative ideas – the more it changes people’s ideas of beauty. – Reese Witherspoon • Courtrooms contain every symbol of authority that a set designer could imagine. Everyone stands up when you come in. You wear a costume identifying you as, if not quite divine, someone special. – Irving Kaufman • Debased men, but they all had something in common: They showed a keen regard for virtue, and tried to dress themselves in that costume. Hypocrisy, for all its bad reputation, at least showed a decent respect for goodness. – Orson Scott Card • Diplomacy is the police in grand costume. – Napoleon Bonaparte • does you costume involve leather?” she’d asked. and he’d said, “Actually, yeah, it might.” it really did. it involved a leather dog collar, leather pants and a leash, and the leash was held by Ysandre, who was in skintight red rubber, from neck to knee high boots. she’d topped it off with a pair of devil horns and a red tridant. she’d made Shane her dog, complete with furry dog mask. ***”Breathe,” Myrnin said. “I’m not much for it myself, but i hear it’s quite good for humans.”*** – Rachel Caine • Drag for me is costume, and what I’m trying to do is, sometimes I’ll go around and wear makeup in the streets, turn up to the gig, take the makeup off, do the show, and then put the makeup back on. It’s the inverse of drag. It’s not about artifice. It’s about me just expressing myself. So when I’m campaigning in London for politics, I campaign with makeup on and the nails. It’s just what I have on, like any woman. – Eddie Izzard • Each character represents a different color on the big palette of what this ultimate painting is going to look like, who your guy is, and just try to be as honest and simple and real as you can possibly be. The outer trappings are incidental – costumes, period, makeup – all of that is rather insignificant at the end of the day. – Ron Perlman • Every day each of us wakes up, reaches into drawers and closets, pulls out a costume for the day and proceeds to dress in a style that can only be called preposterous. – Mary Schmich • Every year, I have to spend another hour working out. Pretty soon I’ll be spending eight hours working out just to fit in the costume. I have the feeling that the minute I stop doing the character, boom, Roseanne Barr. – Cassandra Peterson • Everyone goes to the ‘Grands-Boulevards’ (in Paris, ed.) and let himself loose… …Do not picture these in costume, they are not for the most part… …perhaps a clown with a big nose, or two girls with bare necks and short skirts… …the parade of the queens of the halls (markets) is also one of the events… …Some are pretty but look awkward in their silk dresses and crowns, particularly as the broad sun displays their defects – perhaps a neck too thin or a painted face which shows ghastley white in the sunlight. – Edward Hopper • Fashion offers no greater challenge than finding what works for night without looking like you are wearing a costume. – Vera Wang • Figure skating is theatrical, and a part of it is wearing costumes. My costumes were very over-the-top and outrageous for figure skating. But for me, it’s all beautiful. Even when nobody else believed they were beautiful, I felt beautiful in them. – Johnny Weir • For each human being there is an optimum ratio between change and stasis. Too little change, he grows bored. Too little stability, he panics and loses his ability to adapt. One who marries six times in ten years won’t change jobs. One who moves often to serve his company will maintain a stable marriage. A woman chained to one home and family may redecorate frantically or take a lover or go to many costume parties. – Larry Niven • For the kind of thing that we were showing, the budget was sufficient. As we were speaking of in Haiti, we had not done that before in exactly this form and we had to have costumes for it. – Katherine Dunham • Fresh from a costume fitting, where I had been posing in front of the mirror assuming what I thought was a strong position – arms folded, butch-looking…you know – I met with the woman in charge of Holloway police station. She gave me the most invaluable advice: never let them see you cry, and never cross your arms. When I asked why, she said ‘because it is a defensive action and therefore weak. – Helen Mirren • Get my swan costume ready. – Anna Pavlova • Halloween is my favorite holiday, and I always go all-out with my costumes. – Ginnifer Goodwin • History, we know, is apt to repeat itself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume. – George Eliot • I always go into a blocking rehearsal with an anchor, with a blocking plan. And sometimes they’ll step into the room and they’ll be in costume and you’re like, “That sucks, that’s not going to work. Let’s think of something new.” – Ava DuVernay • I am interested in costume. Clothes in your daily life are important: your choices say something about you, even if what they’re saying is about non-choice. And what you wear in a film is crucial. – Clemence Poesy • I am out in public and using the phone. I am in a phone booth, got the phone in my hand and a man taps on the glass and says You using the phone? Nope, I’m superman, i am just looking for my costume. Here’s your sign! – Bill Engvall • I am very sorry if I have caused any offence. It was a poor choice of costume. – Prince Harry • I believe that God—if he exists at all—is what we want him to be. The true God is unknowable, and so we dress him up in costumes that make him visible to us. Then we come up with a lot of very silly rules that we attribute to him and tell everyone if they don’t follow those rules, they can’t be part of the gang. – Michael Thomas Ford • I can still fit into my Battlestar Galactica costume! – Dirk Benedict • I consider myself an artist, but instead of paint or clay, my medium is drag. I put so much of myself into my drag from every detail of the costume, makeup and hair to my performance, the way I speak or even stand. – Manila Luzon • I definitely feel, when I’m wearing the costume, that I could scare people and hurt them. – Joan Severance • I design all of my costumes. I like to go out there and feel like I have contributed to every part of what I do. I choose the music, the choreographer, I’ve obviously chosen my coach, my costumes – all if that falls under my realm of power, my realm of influence. – Johnny Weir • I don’t believe in fashion. I believe in costume. Life is too short to be same person every day. – Stephanie Perkins • I don’t think I ever said, “I want to be an actress.” But for Halloween, I dressed up as a movie star from when I was seven to when I was twelve. The costume was always a long dress, with makeup, and my hair curled, and jewelry on. And the movie star was always Jenny McCarthy. So right there you could see a little pattern. – Jenny McCarthy • I don’t think that I could fit into the costume anymore. – Lee Meriwether • I dressed up as a veterinarian for a Halloween costume party. I had the lab coat. I got a couple of stuffed animals for patients and put bandages on them. – Tracy Chapman • I felt like, in the recent past, people have been apologizing for Superman, a little bit, for his costume, for his origins, and for the way he fits into society. – Zack Snyder • I firmly believe lyrics have to breathe and give the audience’s ear a chance to understand what’s going on. Particularly in the theater, where you have costume, story, acting, orchestra. – Stephen Sondheim • I gradually work myself into a frenzy as the shoot approaches, while we’re choosing the costumes or working with the make-up artist. I’m not so much interested in my character as the film itself. – Jeanne Moreau • I had a lot of fun with my costume designer. – Adam Lambert • I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added. – Louise Glück • I hate bananas. I just hate them. But I also think a banana suit is the funniest fruit costume a person can wear. – Paul Neilan • I hate Halloween. I hate dressing up. I hate – I wear wigs, makeup, costumes every day. Halloween is like, my least favorite holiday. – Amy Poehler • I hate Technicolor. Everybody in a Technicolor movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid costume in each new scene and to stand around like a clotheshorse with a lot of very green trees or very yellow wheat or very blue ocean rolling away for miles and miles in every direction. – Sylvia Plath • I hate the terminology of “costume” because my clothes are not costumes at all. I think they’re high fashion, avant-garde, and more couture, definitely, and yes, some of my pieces are not particularly wearable, but I wouldn’t say they’re costumes, I’d say they’re more couture. – Christian Siriano • I have a ton of cousins on my moms side of the family, and we would put on shows together all the time and put on costumes, and we even charged our parents money. – Maulik Pancholy • I have been interested in fashion since I was a kid. Then I lived in London, where it was more about costume and a personal statement of who you are than about fashion. – Zaha Hadid • I have friends who wear Star Wars costumes and act like the characters all day. I may not be that deep into it, but there’s something great about loving what you love and not caring if it’s unpopular. – Kristen Bell • I have over five thousand costumes and props and cars, and I have a twenty-five thousand square foot warehouse full of memorabilia. – Debbie Reynolds • I just love doing costume dramas; I am very lucky, as I see myself as a part-time time traveller. – Julia Sawalha • I knew ‘Be Our Guest’ would be performed on a set and in costume, but anyone with a history in Theatre In Education will know that can mean anything. – Pippa Evans • I knew I would grow up and wear a costume one day, and that’s exactly what happened. – Cassandra Peterson • I like that totally mixed up kind of eclectic group of personal props and bits of costume and I think the fun of doing that is where I was very lucky with Doctor Who. – Lalla Ward • I like to work in costumes, makeup, and hair that allow me tremendous freedom. – Jessica Lange • I liked the choreography, but I didn’t care for the costumes. – Tommy Tune • I love all the voiceovers I do. I can’t remember them all, but I seem to do them all of the time. And there’s nothing easier because you just stand and read the script, and you don’t have to act the way actors do. You don’t have to be made up and put costumes on. – Stan Lee • I love costumes. I love getting dressed up because it really helps my imagination make the leap to believe that I am who I say I am. – Alessandro Nivola • I love costumes. My dream growing up was always to have my own costume and prop shop. – Amy Sedaris • I love fashion. I always have. When I was a kid, I was in almost full-on costumes when I went to school, and I’ve retained a bit of that in my adulthood. – Lake Bell • I love putting on an outfit or a costume and just looking at myself in the mirror. Baggy pants or some real funky shoes and a hat and just feeling the character of it. That’s fun to me. – Michael Jackson • I loved doing all those costume dramas. I didn’t think, ‘Ooh I’ve got to avoid being typecast’ – you can’t ever be dictated to by what other people think. I just do things because I fancy the parts and the directors. – Helena Bonham Carter • I only assumed those dresses were costumes, based on the garish nature of the plumage. – Kami Garcia • I picked out my Halloween costume. I’m going as ‘Slutty Madeleine Albright.’ – Conan O’Brien • I put the costume on and said ‘It’s not very comfortable, but it looks amazing,’ so it’s all good. – Chris Hemsworth • I read and watch movies. I can’t go to the movie theater much anymore, though, because I get recognized. It’s worse sometimes if I wear a costume and try not to get recognized. I watch most of my films on airplanes – Ayumi Hamasaki • I realized that I wanted to play characters and do traditional theatre. I wanted to make believe again. I like putting on a costume and pretending to be someone else for a few hours, and I have a great respect for playwrights. – Lusia Strus • I remember playing football dressed in peculiar costumes with some friends in France and laughing so hard we couldn’t even stand up, let alone kick the ball. – Fred Frith • I said old Jesus probably would’ve puked if He could see it – all those fancy costumes and all. Sally said I was a sacrilegious atheist. I probably am. The thing Jesus really would’ve liked would be the guy who plays the kettle drums in the orchestra. – J. D. Salinger • I see my face in the mirror and go, ‘I’m a Halloween costume? That’s what they think of me?’ – Drew Carey • I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes. – Anais Nin • I thank you for your kind invitation to introduce me to the president of the Republic. Since I have not been out of my atelier for two months, I have no appropriate costume for this circumstance. Please excuse me. – Camille Claudel • I think color, for a costume designer, is one of your biggest storytelling devices. – Alexandra Byrne • I think I’m better at live shows than I used to be because I’m way more comfortable with the uncomfortable pauses between songs. Now, rather than trying to talk or do a costume change, I’ll use those moments for myself. I listen to what other people are playing, or just rest, or dance, even though I don’t know how to. – Fiona Apple • I think of clothes a lot like costumes. I think of what I wear in real life as being my real life character’s costume. – Ginnifer Goodwin • I think people feel starved of nice, glamorous entertainment. They want to see costumes and gaiety and a singer; old-fashioned entertainment – it won’t die easily. – Ronnie Corbett • I think that when you put yourself, as actors have to do, in other people’s shoes, when you have to put on the costume that someone else has worn in their life, it gets much, much harder to be prejudiced against them and even to be – to not try to look at the world in a sense of “I’m not going to judge somebody. I’m going to try to understand who they are and what they’re about.” – Kevin Spacey • I tried to end our little duel. I called out pacifying words; I entreated; I finally surrendered. Still Clyde came, my pirate costume so great a success that it had apparently convinced him that we were back in the golden days of romantic old New Orleans when gentlemen decided matters of hot dog honor at twenty paces – John Kennedy Toole • I try to get to know the actors as much as I can. I feel like I’m friends with them for starters and for a week or two, we rehearse when they’re getting the costumes together. – Gus Van Sant • I try very hard not to take work home, but it can be tricky. Sometimes it feels as if you are wearing your costume underneath your own clothes! I suppose things are always ticking away in the back of your mind. – Anne-Marie Duff • I wanna begin saying a story about my son. I have a four-year old son who loves superheroes from Spider-Man to Iron Man to Batman. He’s got all the costumes. One day he looks at me and says ‘Dad, I want to be light-skinned so I could be Spider-Man. Spider-Man has light skin.’ That was sort of a shock. This is why I am excited to be a part of the Marvel Universe, so I could be hopefully provide that diversity in the role of the superhero. – Djimon Hounsou • I want to create things while I have time on Earth, and the art of costume and culture has always inspired me. – Johnny Weir • I was obsessed with being popular when I was in high school and never achieved it. There’s photos from our high school musicals and things, and I’m comically in the deep background, wearing a beggar’s costume. – Mindy Kaling • I will confess I did none of my own singing. I did all my own costume and makeup, though. – Gary Cole • I would love to play the Femme Fatale or an action role like Trinity in the Matrix or something like that. You know, a part with a lot of costume changes. – Josie Maran • I’d hear some beautiful Sade or Kings Of Convenience ballad remixed in a club and I liked that these simple little songs seemed to be masquerading. They had put on superhero costumes, got all beefy, and here they were on the dancefloor. I was interested in that. I can’t make electronic beats, so I leave it to the pros like Boys Noize and Chromeo. – Feist Ideas, Possums, Officers • If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up? – Chuck Palahniuk • If human beings had genuine courage, they’d wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. – Douglas Coupland • If I’ve learned anything in twenty-nine years, it’s that every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that’s sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar. My gift – bad choice of words – is that I can look at you, him, her, them, whoever, and tell right away what is keeping them awake at night: money; feelings of insignificance; overwhelming boredom; evil children; job troubles; or perhaps death, in one of its many costumes, perched in the wings. What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives. – Douglas Coupland • If Jacob was right and clothes were costumes and makeup a mask, then our attitudes and habits must be our shields. – Justina Chen • I’ll tell you…why Wonder Woman worked. Or Bionic Woman. Or any of those [shows] really. It was because it wasn’t about brawn…it was about brains. And yes, she happened to be beautiful, she happened to be kind of extraordinary in some way, but she wasn’t a guy. And I think that, [now], they…put out a female hero, and all they are doing is changing the costume from a man to a woman…they’re not showcasing any of the tremendous dichotomies than women possess in term of softness and toughness, sweetness and grit, inner and outer strength. – Lynda Carter • I’m a big comic book nerd so every time I’m in costume and see everyone in costume I’m just like “This is sick.” – Franz Drameh • I’m a child of the downloading age. I remember when I was 10, a friend who went to the same school as me came to our [school’s] costume party with a really weird hairdo. She had all these little knots in her hair. I asked her who she was and she said she was Björk. I thought this Björk must be a really cool person, so I got on the internet when I got home and found as much as I could on Björk and I fell in love. – Tove Styrke • I’m a fiend for costume jewellery and have countless pairs of rhinestone or diamante earrings, which are so flattering when they catch the light. I love the designers Alexis Bittar and Kenneth Jay Lane, and I always go to jewellers Butler & Wilson. – Joan Collins • I’m a pain in the ass to all of the costume designers with whom I work because I have very strong feelings about the subject. – Meryl Streep • Im able to hang up the character with the costume at the end of the movie. – Kevin Spacey • I’m glad I was born when I was. My time was the golden age of variety. If I were starting out again now, maybe things would happen for me, but it certainly would not be on a variety show with 28 musicians, 12 dancers, two major guest stars, 50 costumes a week by Bob Mackie – the networks just wouldn’t spend the money today. – Carol Burnett • I’m not the best audience for that because I’m not a great science-fiction fan. I just never got off on space ships and space costumes, things like that. – Gary Oldman • I’m sure favorite moments in movies are things that just happen accidentally when the camera is there. You have to do all the homework to get yourself into the period, the costumes, the style, the voice, the hairdo or whatever it is, but once you’ve done all that work, you have to kind of let it go and just be there. If you’re always thinking about it, it just looks a bit over-thought. – Tom Hiddleston • I’m sure that there must have been times when you have read books or watched films and found yourself secretly wishing for the villain to win. Why? Isn’t that against the rules by which our society lives? Why should you feel this way? It’s simple, really; the villain is the true hero of these tales, not the well-intentioned moron who somehow foils their diabolical scheme. The villain get’s all the best lines, has the best costumes, has unlimited power and wealth- why on earth would anyone not want to be the villain? – Mark Walden • I’m very good at living out of a suitcase. I love dressing up every morning. It feels like a costume, in some ways. – Morgan Saylor • I’m very much into the costuming of any character that I portray and it’s one of the great things about making movies is it’s a collaborative art form so you get all these artists who are looking specifically about for this instance your character’s costume and what that might tell about your character. – Jeff Bridges • Immortals is without doubt the best-looking awful movie you will ever see. Eiko Ishioka’s costume designs alone deserve an Oscar nomination. “They weren’t at all historically accurate,” grumbled a woman in the elevator after the sneak preview, as if lots of documentation exists about the wardrobes of the gods. She added: “I guess that’s what we deserve for using free tickets we got at a Blackhawks game. – Roger Ebert • In a costume, you need very exaggerated body language – as you say, sort of mime-type skills. – Warwick Davis • In dreams we are true poets; we create the persons of the drama; we give them appropriate figures faces, costumes; they are perfect in their organs, attitudes, manners; moreover they speak after their own characters, not ours; and we listen with surprise to what they say. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • In general, costumes are the first thing in life that let other people know who we are. They indicate who the person is without saying anything. – Molly Parker • In some ways, Halloween is much easier for women. They can just dress as sluts, and it’s kind of a costume, if they never do any other time. – Chuck Klosterman • In the old days when I first was coming up, you would turn up on set in the morning with your coffee, script, and hangover and you would figure out what you were going to do with the day and how you were going to play the scenes. You would rehearse and then invite the crew in to watch the actors go through the scenes. The actors would go away to makeup and costume and the director and the DP would work out how they were going to cover what the actors had just done. – Paul Bettany • Inside the envelope with the letter was a little Princess Leia action figure USB flash drive. For me to store my novel on, since he was right – I never back up my computer’s hard drive. The sight of it – it’s Princess Leia in her Hoth outfit, my favorite of her costumes (how had he remembered?) brought tears to my eyes. – Meg Cabot • It is a process of finding the right music then planning a costume to fit that style of music. – Nancy Kerrigan • It is amazing to me how deeply into the popular culture the creature has become. There are zombie walks in every major city. I live in Toronto, and last year 3,000 people came out dressed as zombies…. I do not get it. Maybe it’s an easy costume: Splash some ketchup on and rip up your jeans — although most people already have torn jeans — and you’re done. – George A. Romero • It is only in the case of the Priestly Code that opinions differ widely; for it tries hard to imitate the costume of the Mosaic period, and, with whatever success, to disguise its own. – Julius Wellhausen • It reminds me of how grandmother always had the right costume for me to wear. You wear the right outfit and you feel like the person you’re pretending to be. – John Boyne • It took me a while to warm to the ’20s costumes on ‘Downton.’ I love it when women accentuate their curves, and that era was all about hiding them. The shapes they wore then were in tune with female empowerment. Cutting off their hair and hiding their busts was a way of saying, ‘We’re equal to men!’ – Lily James • It was amazing that during rehearsals, without any of the costume on, the character was there complete. It just happened. Half the time, I didn’t know I was doing it. – Peter Mayhew • It was something I was more interested in myself. When I went to see my sister dance at ballet, I was really into costumes and the arts, and my family was also supportive of whatever me and my sister wanted to do. I would say I pushed myself the most to be into design. – Christian Siriano • It was the sheer variety of the pain that stopped me from crying out. It came from so many places, spoke so many languages, wore so many dazzling varieties of ethnic costume, that for a full fifteen seconds I could only hang my jaw in amazement. – Hugh Laurie • It’s an addiction. I love clothes. I like to go down Melrose and look in all the windows and I go to different flea markets. I have lots of costumes. You never know when you’re going to have to dress up like a milkmaid from the 1600s. – Zooey Deschanel • I’ve always been attracted to romantic secondhand clothes. But my style developed as I started going to these strange raves where everybody had these very definitive costumes. – Florence Welch • I’ve always been misrepresented. You know, I could dress in a clown costume and laugh with the happy people but they’d still say I’m a dark personality. – Tim Burton • I’ve always wanted to be Wonder Woman, of course. She had the greatest costume. – Kelly Hu • I’ve always worked closely with the designers and whoever’s making the costumes. Comfort is the last thing you want on your mind when you’re competing. In an ideal situation, you’ll have something where you’ll put it on and you’re fine and you don’t have to worry about it at all. – Kristi Yamaguchi • I’ve done a lot of costume drama and theatre – the National Theatre and In fact, most of my work at the theatre, at the National Theatre anyway, was period. – Brenda Blethyn • I’ve done approximately 15 films, and most of the things I’ve done have either been stunt or costume work. – Verne Troyer • I’ve made quite a number of movies like Castaway and a few others where I’m the only guy in the movie and the only place to be is right next to the camera in costume ready to go in order to get it. The years, and more specifically probably the four months prior to beginning shooting, is where the big preparation is that the director does because I knew we were going to get on the set. And the good news is, if you’re the boss, if it ain’t good, you don’t use it. You just cut it out. – Tom Hanks • I’ve never done a lead role in a film this big [like Doctor Strange], in a franchise this big. One of the reasons was, I wanted to know what the toy box was like. And it’s just insane, the amount of facility that everyone gets, but the amount of artistry and craft that’s brought to every aspect of filmmaking. I mean, you go to your first costume fitting and it’s one of thirty. It’s a myriad, but it’s for a reason. There are so many incredible costumes in this. – Benedict Cumberbatch • just because I don’t have on a silly black costume and carry a silly broom and wear a silly black hat, doesn’t mean that I’m not a witch. I’m a witch all the time and not just on Halloween. – E. L. Konigsburg • Madonna has a far profounder vision of sex than do the feminists. She sees both the animality and the artifice. Changing her costume style and hair color virtually every month, Madonna embodies the eternal values of beauty and pleasure. Feminism says, ‘No more masks.’ Madonna says we are nothing but masks. Through her enormous impact on young women around the world, Madonna is the future of feminism. – Camille Paglia • My book is very wild. But you know during the period of BATMAN, that there were thousands of Batman and Robin costumes sold and these weren’t just for kids. – Burt Ward • My costumes were made for sex appeal not for women. – Brenda Holloway • My fancy dress costume of choice is… something 1920s or 30s, when there was still so much elegance and attention to detail. An excuse for ultimate dressing-up indulgence. – Ellie Goulding • My father has developed a tradition of surprising us at some point by appearing in fancy dress. He buys a new costume each year and typically gets carried away. A couple of Christmases ago he appeared in an inflatable sumo outfit. Its endearing, really, and only quite embarrassing. – Pippa Middleton • My first acting experience was a non-speaking role as a robot. My costume was a cardboard box covered in tinfoil, but I was so shy I refused to go on stage. – Jessica Raine • My girlfriend’s a costume designer in the theater. – Philip Seymour Hoffman • My mom did costumes for the Pointer Sisters. – Slash • My mom used to make my costumes when I was little; she sews a lot. One year, I was a bride and I had a big wedding dress and a bouquet. Another year I was a medieval princess with a long teal dress and a veil. It was a little extravagant, but it was cute! – Sasha Pieterse • My neighbors tell me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilities they met at the dinner-table; but I am no more interested in such things than in the contents of the Daily Times. The interest and the conversation are about costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will. – Henry David Thoreau • My objects dream and wear new costumes, compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands and the sea that bangs in my throat. – Anne Sexton • Nice costume,” he said. “Ditto. I can tell you put alot of though into yours.” Amusement curled his mouth. “If you don’t like it, I can take it off.” I tapped my chin thoughtfully. “That just might be the best proposal I’ve had all night.” “My offers are always the best, Angel. – Becca Fitzpatrick • No matter how many modern parts I do, people still refer to me as Mrs. Costume Drama. – Helena Bonham Carter • No touching Baby Jesus.” “But we’re his parents!” proclaimed Mary Beth, who was being generous to include poor Joseph under this appellation. “Mary Beth,” Barb Wiggin said, “if you touch the Baby Jesus, I’m putting you in a cow costume. – John Irving • No, officer, I have no idea why I’m wearing this possum costume. I called you what? OH. My bad.” -Nastasya – Cate Tiernan • Nothings makes a woman look older that a rich costume. – Coco Chanel • Now people need special costumes to ride bicycles. I mean, a helmet, what, are you an astronaut?? – Fran Lebowitz • Now what else is the whole life of mortals, but a sort of comedy in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each ones part until the manager walks them off the stage? – Desiderius Erasmus • O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales. – Leo Rosten • Oh, hello,” Dr. M says, shaking Balder’s hand. “Wonderful costume. I’m a bit of a role player myself on the weekends. Tell me, where did you get the helmet?” It was forged in the North, blessed by the hands of Odin, given to me by my mother, Frigg,” Balder answers. Lovely. I got mine on the Internet. – Libba Bray • On the side of box of my superman costume it actually said – ‘Do not attempt to fly!’ – Jerry Seinfeld • Once you embody the language, the character comes really naturally, especially when you put the costume on. – Lucy Liu • One time I forgot my costume, and I had to do a scene in my pants, and I got my knob caught in a clapperboard. – 2D • People always seem to assume that we have a full, back-up support team – make-up, costume and a driver – but usually, in a war zone, there’s only me and the cameraman. – Kate Adie • People assume, because I’m Hef’s girlfriend, that I’m a Bunny and I’m a Playmate and I’m a centerfold, but they’re different things. If you’re a Playmate or a centerfold, which is the same thing, you pose for the magazine, you are one particular month, and not every Playmate is a Bunny. A Bunny is a girl who used to work at the Playboy Club, she had the Bunny costume, and now that we don’t have Playboy Clubs, it’s just Playmates who work special promotions and are fitted for a Bunny costume. – Holly Madison • Period costume films are fun to discover, but they’re not relatable. It’s more, ‘Wow, that’s cool – did it really look like that back then?’ Whereas with a comedy, you’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s me, that’s my friends.’ No matter what, I want people to relate. – Paul Feig • Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one side, and those who are still engaged in changing themselves, on the other. Agitators of arrested metamorphosis versus agitators of continued metamorphosis. The former have the advantage of numbers (since most people accept themselves as successes or failures quite early), the latter of vitality and visibility (since self-transformation, though it begins from within, with ideology, religion, drugs, tends to express itself publicly through costume and jargon). – Harold Rosenberg • pools of blood are not recreational even lifeguards drown when the undertow breaks bread with the underbelly demons disguised as sharks have not put enough thought into their costumes a wiseman stays ashore when pointed fins read like italian subtitles the end is near (…) the beginning – Saul Williams • Radio is truly the theater of the mind. The listener constructs the sets, colors them from his own palette, and sculpts and costumes the characters who perform in them. – Mercedes McCambridge • Satan himself can’t save a woman who wears thirty-shilling corsets under a thirty-guinea costume. – Rudyard Kipling • She said, “I’m going to have you fired.” I had two people say that to me today, “I’m going to have you fired.” Go ahead, be my guest. I’m wearing a green velvet costume; it doesn’t get any worse than this. Who do these people think they are? I’m going to have you fired!” and I wanted to lean over and say, “I’m going to have you killed. – David Sedaris • Shigure Sohma: [got Tohru a maid costume for White Day] I can’t wait to for her to call me master while wearing this. Hatsuharu Sohma: Just don’t get arrested, okay? – Natsuki Takaya • Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to a deed. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to deed. A skillful man reads his dreams for his self-knowledge; yet not the details, but the quality. What part does he play in them – a cheerful, manly part, or a poor, drivelling part? However monstrous and grotesque their apparitions, they have a substantial truth. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • So you couldn’t protect yourself? The absolute erodes; the boundary, the wall around the self erodes. If I was waiting I had been invaded by time. But do you think you’re free? I think I recognize the patterns of my nature. Bud do you think you’re free? I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added. – Louise Glück • So, did the costume come with a condom, or is that sold separately? – Rachel Vincent • Some directors hand over portions of their movie to their head of department to the point where it’s like, “I’m not going to talk to you about the costumes, but I’m going to let you talk to the expert.” Rather than, “You want to talk stitching, let’s talk stitching. You want to talk grade of leather? Let’s.” – Idris Elba • Someone’s going to put the clothes on you, and part of being an actor is wearing costumes. Costumes tell you an awful lot about who you are, so you just, it’s nothing. – Morgan Freeman • Sometimes I steal costumes. – Rich Fulcher • Steampunk is…the love child of Hot Topic and a BBC costume drama – Gail Carriger • Tales of adultery are much improved by period costumes. – Mason Cooley • The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. – Percy Bysshe Shelley • The costume designer designing clothes that helped the comedy in The Proposal, that sold the character. Each and every detail was so perfectly thought of, what wouldn’t be here? That’s a lost art. – Sandra Bullock • the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life. – Oscar Wilde • The costume of women should be suited to her wants and needs. – Amelia Bloomer • The costume that I wear on the show is a little snug and doesn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination. I don’t have a problem with it because of the way this character’s been written. – Jeri Ryan • The Dutch at close proximity looked much like Americans, apart from their peculiar uniforms, and so it was their uniforms I fired at, half convinced that I was killing, not human beings, but enemy costumes, which had borne their contents here from a distant land; and if some living man suffered for his enslavement to the uniform, or was penetrated by the bullets aimed at it well, that was unavoidable, and the fault couldn’t be placed at my feet. The private charade was not equivalent to Courage, but it enabled a Callousness that served a similar purpose. – Robert Charles Wilson • The fashion I’ve acquired over the years is so sacred to me – from costumes to couture, high fashion to punk wear I’ve collected from my secret international hot spots. I keep everything in an enormous archive in Hollywood. The clothes are on mannequins, also on hangers and in boxes with a photo of each piece, and there’s a Web site where I can go to look through everything. It’s too big – I could never sort through it myself! But these garments tell the stories of my life. – Lady Gaga • The first time I met Prince he invented me to his birthday party in Minneapolis. It was a costume party and I came as a beatnik – a beret and a charcoal goatee. He was dressed like an executioner. I talked to him for awhile and he didn’t know who I was, and when I told him he was real surprised. – Paul Reubens • The historical side of fashion was very attractive to me when I was a teenager in Moscow, working for the costume departments in various Russian theater companies. – Alexander Vassiliev • The Hulk was a unique character because of his strength and power. He doesn’t have a costume like Spiderman or like Superman – The Hulk is more visual. His passion and his strength, that is what separates him from anything else. – Lou Ferrigno • The kinds of things I like with crystals are the really beautiful costume jewelry, vintage pieces, and they usually have that diamond shape. – Zoe Kravitz • The only difference is that religion is much better organized and has been around much longer, but it’s the same story with different characters and different costumes. – James Randi • The skeptics said you can’t put on a costume in the middle of New York – which isn’t true, because everyone’s in a costume here. – Avi Arad • The tabloid that said that I dressed up as a medieval, like a sexy medieval something and that upset me more than the dating rumors that have been circling around that were fake. If somebody thinks I’m going to dress sexy to a costume party, they have another thing coming. – Jennifer Lawrence • The threats against democracy today are in general completely normal. They walk around in costume and tie. – Carl B. Hamilton • There is the danger of over preparation, of loss of spontaneity; over rehearsal is the most terrible thing you can imagine. We do have a very close association between costume and set designer, though. And the cameraman is very important, of course. – Terence Fisher • There’s going to be a Halloween costume [of lavash from Sausage Party]. The whole thing is just so ridiculous. It’s nice. It’s silly, and it’s surreal. – David Krumholtz • There’s no mystery to it. Nothing more complicated than learning lines and putting on a costume. – Morgan Freeman • There’s nothing more fun than putting on an old costume and jewelry and being in a house that’s decorated from the ’20s or ’30s or whatever. • There’s something about being there, on the set, in costume, in the moment, where you start to get a feel for the scene, which is not the same as sitting in your office writing it. – Lionel Wigram • They know they’re going to look beautiful, and I don’t think women should look like costumes. They shouldn’t look like fashion victims. – Ralph Lauren • They said they wanted a lot of feathers, glitter, colourful colours. A costume. So I had a lady here in Calgary make it. She just kind of put together what I had in mind. – Owen Hart • They take the paper and they read the headlines. So they’ve heard of unemployment and they’ve heard of bread-lines. And they philanthropically cure them all by getting up a costume charity ball. – Ogden Nash • This is my costume. I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everyone else. – Christina Ricci • To me, achieving tone, achieving consistency, is exactly the job of a director. It is to be the fusing, the nexus of a whole bunch of people contributing to the complex life of a movie. There are actors, there’s a cinematographer, there’re costume people, set people, there are all these things, and you somehow have to be the person in the middle of it who is making it all synchronize into the same magic bubble. – Edward Norton • To me, the appeal of opera lies in the fact that a myriad of singers and instruments, each possessed of different qualities of voice and sound, against the backdrop of a grand stage and beautiful costumes, come together in one complete and impressive drama. – Junichiro Koizumi • Vitamins ruined my life. Not that there was much left to ruin, but still. I know that blaming vitamins for my horrible life sounds strange. After all, vitamins are supposed to keep people healthy. Also, they’re inanimate objects. But thanks to them I was stuck in the Jackson Center Mall watching my father run around in a bee costume. – Elizabeth Scott • We have a costume closet at home. My family will put on a costume for any excuse. – Bryan Batt • We needed to have a great set decorator, a great D.P., a great costume designer, everybody. Without all these people, we would have made a shitty movie. – Vincent Paronnaud • We post photos of the Halloween costumes and the mustaches made of cupcake frosting. We don’t record the tantrums?and that’s as it should be. But we shouldn’t mistake that for reality. It’s stagecraft. – Libby Copeland • We talk about theatre museums filled with old costumes and things. What we also need is a theatre museum of the old routines on videotape. We are only the custodians of those techniques, and they should be preserved. – Jim Dale • We were a family that made our Halloween costumes. Or, more accurately, my mother made them. She took no suggestions or advice. Halloween costumes were her territory. She was the brain behind my brothers winning girl costume, stuffing her own bra with newspapers for him to wear under a cashmere sweater and smearing red lipstick on his lips. – Ann Hood • Well, I design costumes because I started with the theater in Chicago, but somehow a few lines just sort of fell to me to do it. And I studied it in school and I always liked it. – John Malkovich • Well,the fun part of being a writer is that it’s like making a wonderful film, with no limit on my budget. I can design the sets, the costume, the lightings, I write the script, and then I get to perform all the roles as I step into each character’s skin, zip up, and adopt that point of view. So, to me, they are all compelling and fascinating. – Robin Hobb • What keeps this industry alive is creators doing their own work. Once you change a costume or origin enough times, it’s a dead body – you’re just electrocuting it and keeping it sort of shambling on. There is a lot more creator-owned stuff now, and some of it I look at and go, ‘Oh, that’s his pitch for a TV show. That’s his pitch for a movie. That’s him saying oh, this kind of thing sells.’ I didn’t do that. – Mike Mignola • When all else fails, put on a costume and sing a silly song. – Sam Walton • When I get up in the morning, I go and I work with beautiful women and charming men and funny comedians and dramatic artists. And I’m presented with costumes and great music to choose from and sets. I travel a certain amount of places, so I’ve been living in a bubble. And I like it. – Woody Allen • When I go out and I’m presenting the best side of myself, I want to look different from everyone, but I don’t want it to look like I’m wearing a costume. – Rachel Roy • When the Strokes first started playing gigs, instead of getting into a costume for the shows, we talked about how we should dress every day, in real life, like we’re playing onstage. I don’t really care about clothes, but it’s about wearing something that gives you social confidence. Or maybe helps you pick up chicks. – Julian Casablancas • When you put your costume on and you get your hair and your makeup done [for a role] and you stare in the mirror you feel like a different person. – Michael Shannon • When you’re wearing an animal costume and something bad happens, your facial expression doesn’t change. The animal is deadpan the whole time. If you’re skiing in a gorilla suit and you fall, you just see a gorilla who has no emotion. It’s just a stoic gorilla, wildly falling down a hill, out of control. – Demetri Martin • When youre young, the blue blazer feels like a grown-up costume. – Willie Geist • White is too brilliant to be seen, so yellow is its filter, its costume, revealing that pure light has not only brightness but emotional resonance and depth. – Richard Grossinger • Wild Bill was a strange character, add to this figure a costume blending the immaculate neatness of the dandy with the extravagant taste and style of a frontiersman, you have Wild Bill, the most famous scout on the Plains. – George Armstrong Custer • Without my husband’s costumes I wouldn’t have known how to accomplish what I saw in my own mind’s eyes for choreography. And then seeing our choreography and knowing the background of it I am sure helped my husband a great deal with what he designed for us. – Katherine Dunham • Women: You can’t live with them, and you can’t get them to dress up in a skimpy little Nazi costume and beat you with a warm squash or something. – Emo Philips • You cannot climb the ladder of success dressed in the costume of failure. – Zig Ziglar • You can’t do a machine without knowing something about how it’s going to work. As for the romantics, the costumes bored me and I don’t enjoy doing period clothes. – Boris Vallejo • You can’t have a bad time at Disney World. It’s not allowed. They have hidden electronic surveillance cameras everywhere, and if they catch you failing to laugh with childlike wonder, they lock you inside a costume representing a beloved Disney character such as Goofy and make you walk about in the Florida heat getting grabbed and leaped on by violently excited children until you have learned your lesson. – Dave Barry • You know, being in a rock band, you can’t overdo the costume changes too much because everyone thinks, oh, that’s not a real rock band. Look how many times he changes costumes. That’s not rock. Rock’s about going on in a T-shirt and staying in it and getting it all dirty. But that’s not really my approach. – Mick Jagger • You look at Cheney, Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and Bush – if you saw them on Halloween, they wouldn’t need a costume. You’d give them a treat and compliment them on what great-looking demons they were. They are demons. There’s no doubt about it. – Tommy Chong • You men out there probably think you already know how to dress for success. You know, for example, that you should not wear leisure suits or white plastic belts and shoes, unless you are going to a costume party disguised as a pig farmer vacationing at Disney World. – Dave Barry • You only get one shot in your life and you might as well push yourself and try things. There’s so many interesting aspects of making a movie; the costume department, the set design, the casting itself, the locations. It’s a great, great thing to be involved in if you have the headspace for it, and I do. Try anything once. – Jason Statham • Young people, however, tend to ignore the customs of their elders. Adolescent rebellion has been responsible for all manner of absurd costumes. The more ridiculous a certain fashion is, the more adolescents will cling to it. – David Eddings • Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they’ve memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for the easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality. – Milan Kundera • Youve got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume – they need to know who the character is, what theyre like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play. – Kurt Busiek

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[lavieenfeminist-blog]

This is me, in Santorini, Greece. I’m drinking an iced coffee and preparing to watch the sunset. One would never know by looking at this photo that 4 hours before it was taken, I was in the middle of a yelling match with a fifty year old Greek man. I am not one to be aggressive or to initiate conflict, especially with strangers, but when my friends are involved I become very protective.

I had been backpacking in Europe for almost two months and my two friends and I had experienced our fair share of catcalls and drunken proposals from men we didn’t know. I would get upset and frustrated or laugh in disbelief as men on scooters in Rome flew by screaming that they were “gonna make-ah me their WIFEY”.

It all came across as a joke to me. 

I think because I was in a group of three people I felt protected. I had become the “defender” or the “mama” of myself and my two friends. Whenever we were approached I was the one who would casually tell men to “walk away” or to “kindly f**k off”. Things never escalated past that. Until Greece…

We were walking through a small market when a man who was selling knock off prada bags began yelling at my friend. He said that a “woman with a behind like that needed an accessory like his bags to go with it”. We gave him a disgusted look and kept going-this is when he got mad. He shifted his compliments to insults, calling her behind too large and saying she would never find a man who would want to make kids with a behind like a whale.

I was at another stand getting a gelato when I heard these comments. The lady working, an elderly Greek woman, said that the prada man always said "these silly things” and its just how Greek men handle rejection. She told my friend to eat some extra gelato and get even bigger because some men like a big woman. At this point I was not only upset with the sexist man at the prada stall but became upset with the woman we were dealing with. She, disgusted with the prada man’s behaviour, still couldn’t bring herself to defend women without considering how men think of them.

I don’t know if it was the lack of sleep or lack of decent coffee but I just began yelling at everyone within ten feet of me to stop commenting on our appearance. Yelling, loudly, in front of a lot of people. I was done, I had cracked. 

I approached the prada man and told him that the only ugly thing in this market was his attitude towards women. He was too angry to respond to me but just began yelling cow woman and told me to go eat my ice cream and to roll away. I was so, so angry but at this point people were stopping in their tracks to watch the show down. He asked me if I wanted a prada bag but then pointed out that the strap would be too narrow to fit on my fat arm. The last thing I remember clearly was flapping my arms up and down yelling that he couldn’t handle these arms before my friends dragged me off to another street.

We look back at this incident often and find ourselves in laughing fits. As funny as the commentary might have been it represents a deeply sexualized and problematic approach to women that exists across the world. Women not only need to commodify themselves to fit into society, they need to fit into a certain size to do this. 

My friend, who was so wonderful, had been debased to a problematic objectification. She admitted to us that later that night at the hostel she had examined herself in the mirror noticing the flaws the man at the fake prada stand had pointed out. She knew we would tell her that was a ridiculous thing to do but it didn’t stop her from thinking about how she is viewed from other’s perspective, from male perspectives in particular. I began flapping my arms as a response, telling her that it was okay because my fat arms won’t fit into his fake prada straps. The joke helped a little bit, but I knew she was hurting. 

Carla Rice’s article “Through the Mirror of Beauty Culture” addresses the problematic nature of mirrors and how their growing popularity in the last two centuries has altered how women view themselves. I couldn’t help but think of my friend when I read this article, who despite not respecting the comments of a man we’d never see again, still let the words infect her mind and lead her to stand in front of the mirror while everyone else was asleep.  Carla Rice’s thesis rested on the concept that “Messages in contemporary beauty industries echo women’s efforts to close the gap between their body differences and ideals of desirability by aspiring to their best body.” Rice notes that the idea of the best possible self is always something we are concerned with, and for women we are pressured to focus on our appearance more than men. Rice also describes this industry as sophisticated in its presentation as to deceive us to believe we are the ones making the choice to better ourselves, not the industry. Rice claims “this industry has also become a marketing strategy since it pulls diverse audiences into image-related concerns and, thereby, into consumerism.”

No one, in my opinion and in Rice’s, is safe from this self-doubt, even the most confident of us. My friend was never one to doubt herself, but that man with the prada bags knew exactly what to yell to sting her ego just enough to plant a seed of self doubt. That man thought he could encapsulate my friend through a brief description, just as mirrors try to encapsulate us all in a brief glance. We are not our reflection. Whether we are being reflected in a mirror, in a man’s eyes, or in the eyes of anyone who judges us. Rice’s article not only caused me to think back on the history of mirrors, but also made me imagine a time before they existed. I questioned what beauty meant back then, what beauty means now and how it will change moving forward, soon to be predetermined by a mass consumerism oriented campaign which will do is best to make the next generation hate itself enough to buy their products. 

[swissforextrading]

Forging a Swiss Lens: 3 Ways Zurich Changed My View of Silicon Valley

Guest contributor Matthew Daiter reflects on life at a Swiss startup — and his return to Silicon Valley. There we were, floating down the Limmatplatz on our makeshift inflatable pizza raft. One by one we peeled off the sides, shooting alpine water at one another while ensuring our raft didn’t pop. Stares accompanied our shrieks while we nearly capsized our boat through a turbine. This would only serve as a minimal precursor for the wasps, sunburn, and my almost-lost passport that accompanied our virgin outing of our “Italian Crusader I”. Our outing was an end to my time living in Zurich, and working in the Swiss tech sphere. Starkly contrasting the rain and stress that had greeted me on my first day in Switzerland, this day felt lighthearted. Drinking beer on a pizza, followed by eating a pizza, and eventually simulating a pizza at Seat 3, Gate 75 in Zurich Airport, all distracted me from my recruiter’s lingering responses to my questions at at my new job in Silicon Valley. “Intense,” my recruiter responded to my question about my new hours. “And with a lot of responsibility. Occasionally people work weekends here.” He added, “We’re composed of small teams. If you pull hard, people will notice; but be warned that if you mess up, people know where to point the finger.” People work weekends? Even during crunch-time at our startup in Switzerland, the office was vacant outside of workdays. “Is there over-time pay for working weekends?” I asked. “No overtime. Vacation days are given out on occasion, but no guarantees.” I couldn’t help but question my own actions pertaining to my return back to the States. On one hand, living in Switzerland felt artificial and forced. My hasty departure from the States landed me in an awkward visa situation, granting me permission to live in Luxembourg and long-term sublet in Switzerland. The spoken language carries a heavily localised dialect, rendering it difficult to pick up without costly courses. My nationality hampered my ability to obtain medical treatment or open a bank account in Zu?rich. But on the other hand, living in Zurich forced completely unanticipated personal growth. Weekends once filled with work and JIRA tickets were now occupied with impulsive SCUBA trips off the Italian coast, ibex-spotting excursions in southeast Switzerland, and under-the-bridge “nature raves” a quick train-ride away from Zu?rich proper. Being able to remove myself from the constant specter of work made me more creative and driven; in fact, this replenished focus led to developing the research that landed me and my co-publishers a spot at the European Conference of Computer Vision in 2016. Zurich, with its initially cold and unwelcoming air, proved to be filled with incredibly inviting and skilled individuals that force-fed life into our startup, leading to meetings with Paramount and BMW. Tucked away in the Swiss Alps happened to be a large village of congregated intellectuals pushing the frills of science without the warping magnet of fiscal motivation eroding personal development. Would returning to the States — with weekends working, long commutes, and a culture of outworking others as a sense of social validation — be worth the effort? The Return Returning felt almost foreign. My smile dropped when I left my apartment for my first commute to my job in Sunnyvale. In front of me, a homeless man pleaded for help to cross the street. Bodies rushed past him, urgent to catch fleeting express trains to their six-figure jobs in South Bay. Tripping over the impoverished to make thousands per week symbolized one of many culture shocks on my return to the States: polarization seeps into the foundation propping up San Francisco. This is the system I support? My first train ride would commence my stark re-entry to American Reality. For five days a week, a three-hour roundtrip commute and a ten-hour workday would become standard. Money replaced personal time: from DoorDash’ed desk dinners to Ubers for when public transport closed, money became an excuse for the sacrilege of sleep and after-work personal space. While I hammered away at code for 12 hours a day, my far-sight eye muscles relaxed and my long-term vision diluted to a two-week gaze. My (multi-thousand kilometer) leap of faith revealed far more about Silicon Valley than I could have imagined. There’s a lot of emerging discussion around Hacker News and the Bay Area that spawned from various domestic American events about immigrating to another country to pursue founding a startup. Switzerland tectonically shifted my view of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, debased American Reality for me, and redefined my idea of success. Invariably the right move for me at the time, I hope this article sheds light on the process of immigration and starting-up abroad. Here are three ways my “Swiss lens” changed my vision of Silicon Valley. 1. Less choice leads to more concentration Routine seeps into Swiss culture. Trash must be disposed within certain types of bags. Trains must depart on time. Assigned laundry days are commonplace. The streets are cleanly swept and washed down daily. Like clockwork, Switzerland moves to an implicit schedule expressed throughout the perceivable culture. Tuning out the outside world proved to be one of the main advantages of Zu?rich. The lack of decision-making prodding for attention let our research team more whole-heartedly focus on the tasks at hand. My laundry would be done on Friday night at 6. The 33 bus for home always came to the office at 11:35 (I’m a late sleeper) and left at 00:06. My groceries rarely became unavailable or varied in price, making it easy to budget out monthly costs. All of this culminated in an easy commute to the office, focus on work, and leave without fretting about fiscal or scheduling issues. When returning to the Bay Area, grocery shopping was one of many trivialities that caught me off-guard. Twenty variations of yogurt lined the grocery shelves, each with different price points and niches. At the top were premium and exclusive foreign yogurts. Scanning further down the aisle came variations in yogurt sale points. “No sugar added”. “Icelandic rations”. “Cashew-milk-made”. Overwhelmed by options, I found myself choosing products not due to a rationale on the product itself, but on the advertised price point and deals that accompanied it. As the only common variable between so many dimensions of a product I thought I had known, this was my fallback mechanism. This was just for yogurt. Noise — visual, auditory, cultural — can empower or dampen the focus and amplitude of executing your idea. Growing up in America normalized one extreme of this; Switzerland, the other. San Francisco is filled with all degrees of opportunity; you need to find your place and hone in on what you want. Switzerland can be quiet enough to hear a cigarette crackle at night. You need to construct what you want. While having less choice was initially off-putting, it allowed me to tune out parts of my life that I found didn’t matter, leading to a more efficient work process and faster results. 2. Strong public investment can outperform the private sector in creating better individual experiences. I had always assumed that private companies simply outperformed Bay Area public services because of market pressure and their higher cost. Owning a car or using a ride-share app would get you to a destination faster and more comfortably than using public transport; private schools typically delivered better educational results than the public system (unless you lived in a wealthy school district); and private healthcare was so expensive because its quality was incredible compared to public clinics. Data existed to reinforce this: the MUNI in San Francisco has an on-time rate of 57%. The New York Times published extensive data correlating wealth and educational development; and for the hefty price of Cigna or Kaiser, San Francisco hospitals mostly outrank other national offerings. Switzerland blew my logic out of the water. Transportation In 2013, 87.5% of passengers reached their destination within three minutes of the advertised time within Switzerland. Compare this to the MUNI in San Francisco, which has an on-time percentage rate of 57%. The MUNI’s lack of predictability contributes to the creation of fallbacks onto private infrastructure filling the vacuum for an in-efficient public transportation system in San Francisco, such as ride sharing services like Uber or Lyft. These makeshift props for those that can bear the cost cause the general public to lose out and fluctuations in budgeting transportation for the month, leading to more induced stress and worse predictability. Whether visiting Luxembourg from Switzerland, going on a weekend beach vacation to Italy, or bumming off to the Swiss wilderness, the expansive and well- maintained public transportation system makes daisy-chaining transport links easy and predictable. 1.5 hours of train, bus and cable-car travel can get you to the side of an alp in Amden or a lake in Lucerne. And for this reason, co-workers and I hiked on the weekend and explored Switzerland and surrounding countries. Getting to Yosemite National Park from San Francisco takes around 3.5 hours by car, and even more time by multiple non-coordinated legs of public transportation. Education ETH Zurich and EPFL (Switzerland’s flagship technical universities and two of the top engineering schools in the world) provided top-notch education for all Swiss high-school graduates at an affordable price-point of 580 CHF a semester. Comparable schools in the Bay Area (Stanford and UC Berkeley) offer tuition for $16,329 a semester and $13,900 a semester, respectively, and only admit a select few. Not only did these easily accessible, meritocratic Swiss universities produce a wealth of qualified and ambitious young scientists and engineers, but having ETH Zu?rich twenty minutes away created a backdoor into one of the most qualified talent pools in continental Europe for scaling our startup. Recruiting events like Startup Speed Dating flooded our resume bank with highly capable applicants. With Switzerland’s popular percentage-based work system, these students could easily split work and research, and we could directly profit off of this talent pool. Furthermore, ETH’s free public schooling system for auditors meant that a world-caliber education was only a short bus ride away. In an industry where uncommon educational trajectories are normalized, the Swiss educational system encourages continual educational development without the particular commitment of obtaining a diploma. When performing 3D-reconstruction research, sitting in on classes and hammering top-notch professors with our questions allowed us to move faster throughout our development cycles. Healthcare Finally, healthcare was not only cheap, but also of incredible quality. Under the Swiss system, having healthcare is mandatory; however, average healthcare in Switzerland costs only 200-400CHF ($201-$402) a month. With this, all basic services are provided at a fixed, up-front cost under national law. No insurance company can profit off of these basic services. For an average-salaried Swiss worker ($60,124 in 2016), self-financing healthcare is approachable. When I woke up one morning with an illness, I immediately rushed off to ETH’s hospital for treatment. While I was turned down due to my nationality and lack of Swiss-specific living permit, I was able to obtain treatment at the free clinic within the train station. Although needing to pay out-of-pocket for treatment, Luxembourgish health care covered all of my costs from the social system through expedited invoices. Over the coming months, the clinic urged me to return for checkups (completely covered by social services) while taking high-grade and fast-acting pharmaceuticals (also completely covered by social services) to ensure a full recovery. Normally, clinics in the Bay Area are for the uninsured, with an attached stigma of lesser quality and optionality. Clinics in Switzerland allowed for quick and easy high-quality recuperation. Heavy public investments created reliable, maintainable, and quality services. Zu?rich proved that a system optimised to the needs of the public instead of the individual can offer alternate avenues to provide a better experience that services everyone’s needs. 3. Adjustable work schedules boosted employee retention and easier recruitment of dynamic labor pools In Switzerland, employees can usually decide the percentage of a week they’d like to work in return for the corresponding percentage of a complete full-time salary. Having this concept integrated as a societal norm mitigated outside factors causing burnout and stress. When I became hospitalized, not only were my medical bills completely taken care of, but my teammates emphasized that my return would be on my own schedule with my own ramp-up period. This became integral when returning to my role at Nomoko. In America, employers often limit sick days and can fire employees who can’t promptly return. American companies aren’t required by federal law to provide paid sick days to employees, leaving more than a third of Americans with absolutely no sick days. When we needed to let go of my co-worker, she was legally entitled to receive 70% of her previous compensation for 6 months. Switzerland has an incredible unemployment system: if you ever become unemployed, the Swiss government will provide 70-80% of your prior compensation for up to 18 months. While this may seem overly generous, this doesn’t actually affect the unemployment rate significantly; in fact, Switzerland has the same unemployment rate compared to the United States. A massive societal safety net helped employees feel enabled to take a risk working for our startup. Finally, vacation time is plentiful and without stigma. My American work- weekends were replaced with email-free Alp hikes. When I decided to take my (legal-minimum) four-week holiday on short notice, my boss encouraged me to go to avoid burnout. When I told my coworkers in Silicon Valley that I was going on a two-week vacation to Morocco, one team member shot back “we might not be able to find you, but email can!” American law doesn’t enforce employers to give vacation time off. 43% of Americans working at small businesses cited heavy workloads as a primary barrier to taking time off. While many tech startups in the Bay offer unlimited vacation as a perk, this can quickly be manipulated to ensure no large payouts become necessary for when employees leave, while disabling employees from going on vacation at all. Stigmatizing vacation doesn’t lead to more work getting done; it leads to disgruntled employees, output deceleration, and high workforce throughput. Constant work-sprints in America led to slower results and resentment against my employer. Being able to pause led to higher spikes in creativity and further concentration within the workplace. A Swiss Mindset When leaving for Switzerland, packing my life into a suitcase proved to be surprisingly easy. Irreplaceability trumped all else: I tucked away my typography books and electronics into my check-in bag, along with just a single hoodie for the approaching winter. A quick leaf over my valuables—passport, birth certificate with apostille, flight information—and then I departed. Unpacking my life back in America has been difficult. Caught between multiple cultures, the culmination of working in Switzerland showed me first-hand that cultures tackle and optimise for various social and economic facets and that this active research on what the collective human effort can provide for its citizens benefits humanity as a whole. While I missed the Bay Area for its undying friendliness and creativity, some of its blemishes have become apparent only from gaining distance. Even while undergoing my reintegration to America, my mind still lingers in Switzerland. Shameless plug: if you’re currently looking to make an actual virtual reality Swiss camera (lens included), Nomoko is currently hiring for software, electrical and mechanical engineering positions. They helped change my lens of reality; maybe they’ll help change yours too. --- Photo of Amden, courtesy of Matt Daiter: “My favorite place to hike.”  https://nextrends.swissnexsanfrancisco.org/forging-a-swiss-lens-3-ways-zurich-changed-my-view-of-silicon-valley/ (Source of the original content)

[andreizanescu]

I’ve been buzzing about Wonder Woman since Thursday’s showing and after being asked by a few of you to talk about it, I’ve decided to write an opinion piece. First off though, I’m not the voice that really matters on this. There are a number of incredibly moving reactions like Alicia Lutes’ review for Nerdist, or Susana Polo’s Polygon review of where Wonder Woman stands in the genre, or even Tasha Robinson’s more industry oriented analysis. I’d also give a particularly close read to Emily Gaudette’s piece on body image in the film, written for Inverse Entertainment. There are so many reviews and opinions coming out, written by the film’s intended public and that’s who we should listen to first and foremost.

For reference: http://nerdist.com/wonder-woman-no-mans-land-scene/ https://www.polygon.com/2017/5/30/15675084/wonder-woman-review https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/2/15728630/wonder-woman-review-gal-gadot-dc-extended-universe-patty-jenkins https://www.inverse.com/article/32457-wonder-woman-amazon-army-themyscira-comics If you’re still reading this after checking out those pieces, then awesome! Prepare for a spoiler-laden discussion. Seriously, I’m recommending you go see the movie before reading anything else. Go see it because it’s an amazing movie. Go see it because it supports the inclusion of women in the industry’s leadership and production roles. Go see it because we need more movies like it. Go see it. Everything hereafter is a risky read.

                            ---Production Spoilers---

If I had to describe Wonder Woman in one word, it would be “triumphant”. The film’s tone is one that meshes together an active and infectious optimism, with the courage to open yourself up to suffering and empathy. It is at its heart a movie about understanding the conflicts around us for what they really are, and to begin dismantling the systems of thought that produce them. I suppose though, I should give a quick rundown of more production related aspects.In terms of directing, Patty Jenkins hit a home run. Every single scene is crisp, well shot, well cut and laden with color. Even the dreary grays and browns of London and the Belgium front are incredibly deep. Each locations feels choked by pollution and industry or caked in mud and rain in the Western Front. The feeling of misery and hopelessness is conveyed without even needing to tell you what’s happening. As for Themyscira, the island is the complete opposite. Portrayed as an ageless paradise, the island is lush with greenery, beaches, ancient marble temples and magical pools of water. Jenkins’ selections of what to portray and in what way preemptively sets the tone for the entire film and prepares the viewers.

The casting also works on so many levels. Gadot’s portrayal of Wonder Woman is the rock that the film gravitates around and never falters. With standout supporting performances by Robin Wright as Antiope (as one of the most badass characters I’ve ever seen) and Connie Nielsen as the stern but wise Queen Hippolyta. Danny Huston and David Thewlis as military characters also portray mirror images of each other, as though both characters are one decision from each other’s positions, emphasizing the arbitrary nature of war. Elena Anaya as Isabel Maru and Lucy Davis as Etta Candy ground the movie by filling out the stellar cast. Chris Pine’s casting as Steve Trevor also does wonders for the movie. By casting a strong actor as the supporting role to Wonder Woman, the entire classic structure of lead and support is discussed. I’d argue that although Pine is clearly the secondary character, the way his character is portrayed brings to light how poorly women have traditionally been treated in their supporting roles. This in turn gives storytellers new ideas about how to portray these roles in the future, in much more sensitive and respectful ways.

We should also take a moment to talk about Rupert Gregson-Williams soundtrack, which is nothing short of a masterpiece. In twelve years, since Batman Begins’ release, not one film has managed to create a unique sound for its character. Gregson-Williams takes the core theme created by Zimmer and Junkie XL for Batman v. Superman and refines it by a number of degrees. The theme is deconstructed and recomposed across the album. From No Man’s Land, to Wonder Woman’s Wrath and finally to Action Reaction the theme grows and changes along with the character, while always remaining recognizable. If anything, this is the theme I’d peg for long term longevity in the genre. The soundtrack doesn’t always hit hard though, and some of the softer tracks inflect a haunting sensation or a lingering nostalgia for more innocent moments in the film. I’ve been listening to the album ever since going to the screening and every time it brings to mind specific moments and almost gets me immediately back in that theater seat. There is no higher praise for a film soundtrack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL1wfOnvM8s

                                 ---Story Spoilers--- The only way I can talk about the story is through my own perspective and that is very much note the perspective of the intended audience. The story of the movie speaks to me as a lover of Greek mythology, period pieces about the Great War and an avid superhero fan. This film, it feels to me like, speaks directly to women and to minorities, but also to all people who are trapped living in world where one’s own optimism and desire for harmony is constantly assailed by systems of thought that seem needlessly cruel and arbitrary. Diana’s journey felt harrowing to me. Having already seen her in Batman v. Superman, we knew her as a jaded heroine who had retreated for the modern world, disappointed at the recurrence of war and misery. In a sense, the viewer met a character who felt that she had failed her quest to save the world. This film presents Diana from her early childhood to her first days as a superhero. The film skews bittersweet because in many ways, the viewer knows where the story ends. What I was not prepared for was the extent to which the journey would be a touching and hopeful tale about fallibility and failure. Diana is a naive and hopeful crusader for justice. Bent on ending the war with what seems like an implausible method, she sets off with Trevor in tow. What follows is a series of conflicts in which the audience can’t help but cheer for Wonder Woman’s choices. The No Man’s Land scene is an incredibly touching scene that will remain with me for a long while. 

As someone whose family served in the Great War (my great-grandfather), I’ve heard stories about the despair and helplessness of soldiers and civilians alike. When confronted with that helplessness though, Diana does what we wish as the audience that we could do in real life: Act. There is a beautiful simplicity in the vulnerable act of resistance. For each one of those scenes in the film, I found myself cheering and wishing that she would win, no matter how impossible or naive. What I found was that it wasn’t Diana who was naive as a character, but Trevor (whom I greatly relate to) who was cynical. Diana was not being heroic for the sake of a cause or an ideal. She was heroic simply because she is good, because human suffering is repulsive to her that she would do anything to see it stop.

In contrast, Steve Trevor’s story spoke a great deal to me. His origin point is as a spy, a tried and tested soldier who believes that war should be stopped, but is hampered by real world considerations. Trevor’s journey was first to understand that long term victories matter, but so do all the small instances of human kindness. Saving a few villagers becomes as important as defeating the god of war, or ensuring the armistice. His second arc is also coming to a point where he understand that everyone is responsible for the misery around us, as they are responsible for compassion. His realizations run counter to the patronizing reality that armistice debased and forced certain peoples to bear the weight of the war, while the victors washed their hands of the acts they had committed in the quest for peace. Trevor’s journey to understanding that the allies are not necessarily any better than the Central Powers. 

In Ares we see perhaps the most striking figure of evil and callousness. In fact, in many movies Ares wouldn’t even qualify as a villain. His choices are pragmatic. Offer choice and the path to power, and then watch humanity kill itself. His point of view is that humanity has the potential for destruction and therefore that destruction is a foregone conclusion. This is the rhetoric of many political leaders today and should come as no surprise to viewers. Ares appears as a war profiteer professing to be the god of truth and that the truth is that humanity is ugly, selfish, and violent and embodies a boundless death drive. As Diana’s foil, Ares allows us to understand the importance of optimism and compassion in the face of horrors that occur across the globe.

Wonder Woman is a heartening tale of the power of understanding, empathy and courage in the face of systems of oppression and profiteering. It’s a movie about the need to fight callousness which oftentimes feels like a needed shell in the face of injustice and helplessness. It is a tale about vulnerability and failure that left me cheering. Every act of resistance and every moment of shock that Diana displays is what I wish we engaged in every day for the people who aren’t able to do so. Films like Wonder Woman are important and they are timely. Don’t take my word for it though. Go see the film and read what’s been written by those that the movie champions.