How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
There was a certain kind of beauty, a prettiness that everyone could see. Big eyes and full lips like a kid's; smooth, clear skin; symmetrical features; and a thousand other little clues. Somewhere in the backs of their minds, people were always looking for these markers. No one could help seeing them, no matter how they were brought up. A million years of evolution had made it part of the human brain. (2.47)
This is at the heart of Tally's understanding of prettiness: it's not something arbitrary and just made-up. It's part of everyone's biology that says "big eyes" = "I want." That kind of makes "appearance" sound like some all-controlling tyrant—"oh, I hate that person, but they have big eyes, so I want." It almost seems like there's not a lot of freedom in Tally's version of the world.
Quote #2
"Shay! Come on. It's just for fun."
"Making ourselves feel ugly is not fun." (5.60-1)
Here's the downside of prettiness. (Also the downside of photoshopping people's bodies.) If everyone agrees that "big eyes" = "I want," then people with small eyes will feel bad about themselves. (And possibly have trouble seeing.) Is it possible to imagine a world where everyone got surgery at 16 to be "pretty" and where everyone under 16 felt okay about how they looked? (Probably not.)
Quote #3
Shay splashed a handful of water at her. "You don't believe all that crap, do you—that there's only one way to look, and everyone's programmed to agree on it?" (10.58)
Tally would say yes to this—she thinks there's one way to be pretty and we all agree because of biology. By contrast, Shay doesn't believe any of that, and thinks that people have some freedom to choose who they think is pretty. (To slightly support Shay, here's a bunch of ladies from famous artworks photoshopped to make them look more like what we today think as pretty. (Parental advisory: they're nude.)
Quote #4
"I used to think that too. But when Peris and I would go into town, we'd see a lot of them, and we realized that pretties do look different. They look like themselves. It's just a lot more subtle, because they're not all freaks." (10.61)
Tally makes this comment a few times. (See 2.10: "pretties didn't really all look exactly the same.") But we pulled this quote because we love the line "They look like themselves." How can people look like themselves even after radical plastic surgery? Notice also that Tally thinks the uglies are all "freaks." Oh, such a nice life, growing up thinking you're ugly, waiting for some surgery to make you look like yourself.
Quote #5
She'd been an ugly for four years, but a few extra days had brought home to her exactly what the word really meant. Tally peered into her mirror all day, noting every flaw, every deformity. Her thin lips pursed with unhappiness. Her hair grew even frizzier because she kept running her hands through it in frustration. A trio of zits exploded across her forehead, as if marking the days since her sixteenth birthday. Her watery, too-small eyes glared back at her, full of anger. (15.3)
Since Uglies tells us a lot about Tally's feelings, we hear a lot about how she thinks she's ugly. (Although we're not sure we could draw a picture of her from this description, because we can't draw.) So there's no mystery that (1) she doesn't have big eyes and (2) she's not happy about those eyes. (Her nickname is Squint, after all.) Tally's unhappiness about being ugly is one of the major reasons why she agrees to betray Shay.
Quote #6
It was that same warmth she'd felt talking to Peris after his operation, or when teachers looked at her with approval. It was not a feeling she'd ever gotten from an ugly before. Without large, perfectly shaped eyes, their faces couldn't make you feel that way. But the moonlight and the setting, or maybe just the words he was saying, had somehow turned David into a pretty. Just for a moment. (29.54)
Here's a lesson: if you want people to think you're neat, tell them how great they are. But notice the sting at the end: she thinks David is a pretty, "Just for a moment." Also, notice that Tally is convinced that a "face" could never make you feel good, until it had large, perfectly shaped eyes. We're not so sure about that.
Quote #7
Cities worked very hard to stay independent of one another, but the Pretty Committee was a global institution that made sure pretties were all more or less the same. It would ruin the whole point of the operation if the people from one city wound up prettier than everyone else. (31.5)
The pretty surgery isn't just about making everyone nice to look at. It's also about making everyone equal in the city—and about making every city equal to the others. (Unlike the real world, where Rome is clearly the prettiest city in the world.) This is why the pretty surgery is so important (says Tally): they need to make people equal so people don't get hurt or angry.
Quote #8
"That's the worst thing they do to you, to any of you. Whatever those brain lesions are all about, the worst damage is done before they even pick up the knife: You're all brainwashed into believing you're ugly." (32.65)
David sounds like Shay here (or maybe Shay sounds like him—maybe he's influenced her ideas of prettiness). For David, the problem isn't just the surgery, but the whole social system that says that pretties are better than uglies. Yeah, that sounds like a pretty big problem to us, too.
Quote #9
"Listen, Tally. That's not what's important to me. What's inside you matters a lot more."
"But first you see my face. You react to symmetry, skin tone, the shape of my eyes. And you decide what's inside me, based on all your reactions. You're programmed to!"
"I'm not programmed. I didn't grow up in a city."
"It's not just culture, it's evolution!" (32.84-7)
This argument goes round-and-round in this book: it's the same argument that Tally and Shay have at the beginning of the book and now David and Tally have it toward the end of the book. Are we culturally or biologically programmed to find certain people attractive? Luckily for us, the fact that they have this conversation (over and over) helps us see the different sides of this argument. Do you agree with David and Shay? Or do you think Tally has a point?
Quote #10
They were two of Shay's old friends who'd run away to the Smoke the time she'd chickened out, so it must have been months since they'd seen a pretty face. Everyone seemed willing to let her go on complaining. (47.38)
Compare Croy, Astrix, and Ryde's reaction to Shay ("she has big eyes, so we have to listen to her") to David's reaction: "It was as if David didn't see her beauty"(47.57). This isn't a scientific experiment, but his reaction does make"prettiness" seem cultural. If it were biological, David would be into Shay; but he's not. So, Shay proves her point about how being pretty isn't so special—but she only proves it when she gets made pretty. Darn irony.