Barbie Quotes

“Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?”
― Connie Willis, Bellwether

“So what's your doll's name?" Boo asked me.
"Barbie," I said. "All their names are Barbie."
"I see," she said. "Well, I'd think that would get boring, everyone having the same
name."
I thought about this, then said, "Okay, then her name is Sabrina."

"Well, that's a very nice name," Boo said. I remember she was baking bread,
kneading the dough
between her thick fingers. "What does she do?"
"Do?" I said.
"Yes." She flipped the dough over and started in on it from the other side. "What
does she do?"
"She goes out with Ken," I said.
"And what else?"
"She goes to parties," I said slowly. "And shopping."
"Oh," Boo said, nodding.
"She can't work?"
"She doesn't have to work," I said.
"Why not?"
"Because she's Barbie."
"I hate to tell you, Caitlin, but somebody has to make payments on that town house
and the Corvette,"
Boo said cheerfully. "Unless Barbie has a lot of family money."
I considered this while I put on Ken's pants.
Boo started pushing the dough into a pan, smoothing it with her hand over the top.
"You know what I
think, Caitlin?" Her voice was soft and nice, the way she always spoke to me.
"What?"
"I think your Barbie can go shopping, and go out with Ken, and also have a
productive and satisfying
career of her own." She opened the oven and slid in the bread pan, adjusting its
position on the rack.
"But what can she do?" My mother didn't work and spent her time cleaning the
house and going to PTA.
I couldn't imagine Barbie, whose most casual outfit had sequins and go-go boots,
doing s.uch things.
Boo came over and plopped right down beside me. I always remember
her being on my level; she'd sit
on the edge of the sandbox, or lie across her bed with me and Cass as we listened to
the radio.
"Well," she said thoughtfully, picking up Ken and examining his perfect physique.
"What do you want to
do when you grow up?"
I remember this moment so well; I can still see Boo sitting there on the floor, cross-
legged, holding my

Ken and watching my face as she tried to make me see that between my mother's
PTA and Boo's
strange ways there was a middle ground that began here with my Barbie, Sab-rina,
and led right to me.
"Well," I said abruptly, "I want to be in advertising." I have no idea where this came
from.
"Advertising," Boo repeated, nodding. "Okay. Advertising it is. So Sabrina has to go
to work every day,
coming up with ideas for commercials
and things like that."
"She works in an office," I went on. "Sometimes she has to work late."
"Sure she does," Boo said. "It's hard to get ahead. Even if you're Barbie."
"Because she wants to get promoted," I added. "So she can pay off the town house.
And the Corvette."
"Very responsible of her," Boo said.
"Can she be divorced?" I asked. "And famous for her commercials
and ideas?"
"She can be anything," Boo told me, and this is what I remember most, her freckled
face so solemn, as if
she knew she was the first to tell me. "And so can you.”
― Sarah Dessen, Dreamland

“Did you know that if Barbie was a real woman with those proportions, she'd have to carry her kidneys in her purse?”
― Lani Diane Rich, Time Off for Good Behavior

“For some reason my father saw no problem with us pplaying "barbie and ken go to hawaii to save their marriage by picking up another couple for sexy good times," but if barbie and ken had gone to hawaii to "rescue another couple from a crazed kidnapper," that would have been wrong.”
― Michele Jaffe, Bad Kitty

“He said, I won't have one of those things in the house. It gives a young girl a false notion of beauty, not to mention anatomy. If a real woman was built like that she'd fall on her face.

She said, If we don't let her have one like all the other girls she'll feel singled out. It'll become an issue. She'll long for one and she'll long to turn into one. Repression breeds sublimation. You know that.

He said, It's not just the pointy plastic tits, it's the wardrobes. The wardrobes and that stupid male doll, what's his name, the one with the underwear glued on.

She said, Better to get it over with when she's young. He said, All right but don't let me see it.

She came whizzing down the stairs, thrown like a dart. She was stark naked. Her hair had been chopped off, her head was turned back to front, she was missing some toes and she'd been tattooed all over her body with purple ink, in a scrollwork design. She hit the potted azalea, trembled there for a moment like a botched angel, and fell.

He said, I guess we're safe.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Female Body

“I look like prep school Barbie," Nudge complained, as she entered the kitchen. She caught sight of me in my uniform and looked mollified. "Actually, you like prep school Barbie. I'm just Barbie's friend.”
― James Patterson, School's Out—Forever

“In the past few decades quite a few people have suggested -- citing most often the offence of impossible proportions -- that Barbie dolls teach young girls to hate themselves. But the opposite may be true. British researchers recently found that girls between the ages of seven and eleven harbor surprisingly strong feelings of dislike for their Barbie dolls, with no other toy or brand name inspiring such a negative response from the children. The dolls "provoked rejection, hatred, and violence" and many girls preferred Barbie torture -- by cutting, burning, decapitating, or microwaving -- over other ways of playing with the doll. Reasons that the girls hated their Barbies included, somewhat poetically, the fact that they were 'plastic.' The researchers also noted that the girls never spoke of one single, special Barbie, but tended to talk about having a box full of anonymous Barbies. 'On a deeper level Barbie has become inanimate,' one of the researchers remarked. 'She has lost any individual warmth that she might have possessed if she were perceived as a singular person. This may go some way towards explaining the violence and torture.”
― Eula Biss, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009

“I can still see Boo sitting there on the floor, cross-legged, holding my Ken and watching my face as she tried to make me see that between my mother'sPTA and Boo's strange ways there was a middle ground that began here with my Barbie, Sab-rina,and led right to me.
"She can be anything," Boo told me, and this is what I remember most, her freckled face so solemn, as if she knew she was the first to tell me. "And so can you.”
― Sarah Dessen, Dreamland

“Your mouth says "No," but your eyes say, "Fuck me until your dick breaks off inside me and fuses into some kind of barbie doll crotch.”
― Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead, Vol. 26: Call to Arms

“Honestly, I'd rather be anywhere else. Even home, where my dad begins almost every conversation with, "You should lose the black clothes and wear something with color." Puh-lease. Like I want to look like every Barbie clone in Hell High, a.k.a. Oklahoma's insignificant Haloway High School. Ironically, Dad doesn't appreciate the bright blue streaks in my originally blond/now-dyed-black hair. Go figure. That's color, right?”
― Gena Showwalter

“Humans have only one ending, ideas live forever.”
― Greta Gerwig

“Anyway...I'm a firm believe that every girl should get one Barbie dream wedding in her lifetime, but if that marriage craps out, I'm also a firm believer that all future weddings must be banned to beaches and back yards.”
― Chrissy Anderson, The Hope List

“But there was one girl who had a big influence over me. Barbie. I worshipped Barbie. In fact, I would say Barbie was my twelve-inch plastic life coach. She had it all, a camper, a dune buggy, even a dream house. Part of why it was a dream house to me was that she was the only one who lived there. Her boyfriend, Ken, came to visit when she--er, I decided. She had a sports car and would bounce from job to job as she--er, I saw fit.Barbie owned zero floral baby-making dresses. I craved that indepence. And her weird-ass boobs? So what? She still reached the steering wheel of her royal blue sports car. Some people thought that the fact that her feet were fucked and she couldn't stand was a problem. But to me, it meant she was free. Free from standing at a stove, or a washing machine, or with a baby hanging off her hip. She has no hip. She has no hips. Plus, she didn't have to walk; she drove her convertible everywhere. God, I loved Barbie. She was free in every way I knew how to define freedom.”
― Lizz Winstead, Lizz Free Or Die

“My dad will win, I silently countered, even as I smiled sweetly. I couldn’t wait to spike the ball right through her block, no matter how tall she was. In health class we’d learned that if Barbie were human, she’d be six feet tall and weigh one hundred pounds, and Gisele seemed pretty close to those dimensions. By contrast, my doll representation would be more like Barbie’s Fat Mexican-American Republican sidekick.”
― Jennifer Lane, Blocked

“He thought of the Finishing School for Barbies where long-legged, high-breasted, stomachless girls went to get shaved clean, get their toenails painted pink, their nipples removed, and all body opening sewn shut, except for their mouths, which curved in perpetual smiles and led nowhere.”
― Kate Wilhelm, Kate Wilhelm in Orbit, Volume One

“A girl, hardly ten, holding a Barbie doll by its hair, bent over the edge of the fountain, sprinkled her face and forearms, and stared to the side for a moment as Piccoletto, who was also seated on the edge of the fountain, his legs outspread, chewing at his silver crucifix, pulled off his socks. The girl stared long into his leg holes at his balls hanging from his baggy yellow underwear and at the creased foreskin draped over the head of his large member.”
― Josef Winkler, Natura morta

“Barbie-meets-Joan-Jett”
― E.L. James, E L James Fifty Shades Series 3 Books Collection Set

“Rescue operation," he says, breathless. "Saved Barbie from drowning.”
― Kelley York, Made of Stars

“A black-veiled nun, holding plastic bags full of cucumbers, apricots, and onions in one hand and pressing two tall blonde Barbie dolls wrapped in plastic to her breast with the other, stopped before the tomato vendor, whose vegetable knife hung from a lanyard around his neck, laid the dolls on a wooden crate, and asked for a few kilos of tomatoes on the vine.”
― Josef Winkler, Natura morta

“Barbie...A microplastic's dream girl.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Men, who are more likely to punish you for an abortion
than they are for sexual assault
But if they see the procedure
To be the murderer of a baby inside of a woman
Then tell me.
When a girl gets raped, is the child inside her not dying too?

-Barbie, poem by”
― Demetri Manabat