Words matter. These are the best Aimee Mullins Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Pamela Anderson has more prosthetic in her body than I do. Nobody calls her disabled.
Part of the reason I wanted to model was to push the boundaries and challenge the perceptions of what a beautiful body is supposed to look like. Why should I feel any differently about looking good than anyone else?
I’ve had journalists asking me, ‘What do we call you – is it handicapped, are you disabled, physically challenged?’ I said, ‘Well hopefully you could just call me Aimee. But if you have to describe it, I’m a bilateral below-the-knee amputee.’
The flesh and bone leg is just beautiful. It’s elegant. You know, when it’s working, it’s incredible. But if it’s not working, well, you know, your life is certainly far from over.
In sports, I refused to do any interviews that were just going to become human-interest stories. Don’t turn me into a tragic heroine.
A couple of years ago, I had my DNA sequencing done, and it is all anonymous. When the results came back, my musculature type said, ‘most likely to be a sprinter.’
‘Triumph over tragedy’ – how pathetic! I think people are generally freaked out that I’m multifaceted. You don’t hear people saying, ‘Gwyneth Paltrow won an Oscar – and she’s blonde!’
I’m not an advocate for disability issues. Human issues are what interest me.
I like that Pilates compromises the mind and body. It’s not just about being able to run around the block a few times. It’s about alleviating stress and controlling breathing. It’s about being balanced.
Whether it is your height, your weight or your skin, someone is going to pick on something and make fun of it. My legs were just a more obvious target.
I’ve said this before, but I believe more than ever that confidence is sexier than any body part.
I didn’t see how wearing prosthetics was quite so different from being born with flaming red hair in a crowd of black-haired babies, or being of a different religion from that of every other child in your area.
Life is about making your own happiness – and living by your own rules.
I’ll be giving a speech at the randomest place, like a bank or something, and a guy in a suit will say, ‘I’m totally freaked out that I’m talking to the girl from ‘Cremaster.’ For the rest of my life, that movie will be playing in a museum somewhere. I never could have expected that huge response.
For me, I never ever felt the ownership or any identity with any community of disabilities. I didn’t grow up being told that I was a disabled child.
The legs that I have made are far more perfect than the ones nature would have given me – my mother’s side of the family have awful legs.
We all bullet point our triumphs, but I am who I am because of everything you don’t see on my CV. The stuff that doesn’t work out teaches you how to trust your instincts and adapt.
I have found great power in taking my ‘difference’ out for a spin in a very public way. And usually, the worst, most personally embarrassing thing you imagine in your mind is often not anywhere near as bad in real life.
Walking the runway with Alexander McQueen, I really had to dig deep. You’re with Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. I was the first person out on the runway, but I thought, ‘I have done the Olympics, I can do this.’
Giving up is conceding that things will never get better, and that is just not true. Ups and downs are a constant in life, and I’ve been belted into that roller coaster a thousand times.
People presume my disability has to do with being an amputee, but that’s not the case; our insecurities are our disabilities, and I struggle with those as does everyone.
When I watch ‘Mad Men’ and I see the patronising attitudes to women that are so shocking for all of us to watch now, I feel that I’ve lived and see the same evolution in this regard around disability.
I grew up in a town with a great wrestling tradition. Then I was a team sport queen in high school; I played softball, volleyball, and soccer. Oh, and I also did ski racing.
Beauty is not skin-deep; it can be a means of self-affirmation, a true indicator of personality and confidence.
I’m not running around as a continual ray of sunshine. It’s just I don’t believe in wasting time feeling sorry for myself. Get over it.
I didn’t want to be written about as a human-interest story. I didn’t want to be a passing thing. You know, now we move on to the fat girl who had her stomach stapled. I didn’t want to become a gimmick: the disabled model.
I hate the words ‘handicapped’ and ‘disabled’. They imply that you are less than whole. I don’t see myself that way at all.
It’s factual to say I am a bilateral-below-the-knee amputee. I think it’s subjective opinion as to whether or not I am disabled because of that. That’s just me.
If you watch any John Hughes film of the eighties, that was my childhood experience.
Kids are naturally curious about what they don’t know, or don’t understand, or what is foreign to them. They only learn to be frightened of those differences when an adult influences them to behave that way and censors that natural curiosity.
A lot of my life is about will – having the will to prove what my body can do.
With L’Oreal, I get to be Aimee Mullins, model. No qualifier. And that means everything to me.
True beauty is when someone radiates that they like themselves.
If we want to discover the full potential in our humanity, we need to celebrate those heartbreaking strengths and those glorious disabilities we all have. It is our humanity and all the potential within it that makes us beautiful.
It’s society that disables an individual by not investing in enough creativity to allow for someone to show us the quality that makes them rare and valuable and capable.
Adversity isn’t an obstacle that we need to get around in order to resume living our life. It’s part of our life.
I’m not an advocate for disability issues. Human issues are what interest me. You can’t possibly speak for a diverse group of people. I don’t know what it’s like to be an arm amputee, or have even one flesh-and-bone leg, or to have cerebral palsy.
Belief in oneself is incredibly infectious. It generates momentum, the collective force of which far outweighs any kernel of self-doubt that may creep in.
In athletics, the idea of possibility is presumed. It’s not ‘if;’ it’s ‘how.’
When I’m curious about something, I do it full on and take it as far as I go, but when I feel like I’ve really explored it, I’m OK with putting it aside and going on to something else.
