The messaging campaign that stigmatized the term feminist definitely worked on me when I was a teenager. I always believed in equality, but there's such intense pressure to be cool and not alienate boys, to not be a pain in the ass  -  to not be that kind of woman.

I didn't stop hating my body because my body changed I stopped hating my body because my mind changed. I realized that the beauty standards I'd grown up striving and failing to meet were artificial and arbitrary, and I could choose to simply say no and define my own value.

When I started tentatively dipping a toe into fat-positive internet spaces, I learned that reclaiming the term was the quickest and most powerful way to make it stop hurting. If you can say, Yes, I am fat, and it's okay to be fat, then all of a sudden it doesn't hurt when someone says it to you. And it's also just a descriptor. It's like tall.

One of the most irritating things about America is this bravado we have  -  like, You guys, we're amazing! We're the most amazing country in the world! And I'm like, Are you sure? Because we're garbage and backward in a million areas that other developed countries left behind years ago!

Ashley Graham on the cover certainly better than nothing. It would have felt revolutionary to me as a teenage girl, for sure. But really, all they've done is include a very conventionally attractive woman who is two to three sizes bigger than the model they would usually use.

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

It’s hard to feel hurt or frightened when you’re flooded with pity.

There were moments from my childhood when I remembered realizing that I was too big. I carried them around as weapons to use against myself, to remind myself there was something wrong with me.

The narrative for girls is that you just hang around and wait to be chosen and then you belong to somebody and you live happily ever after. There isn't room for more nuanced concerns about the creepy proprietary nature of that relationship model, or the breadth of what fulfillment really means for women.

I feel like women in comedy have staked out space for themselves and circled the wagons in this inspiring way to say that it's absolutely unacceptable and ludicrous to suggest that women aren't funny anymore in 2016. It just makes you look like a dinosaur.

Indignation and determination are much more constructive emotions than shame and embarrassment. And feminism was this engine that turned one into the other.