Quotes About Authenticity

I wonder if we recognize the irony of telling people to act normal, because to act is to perform a role that isn't real. And I wonder if we truly understand what it does to a human being to tell them to pretend to be someone, or something, they are not, and how this demand requires people to repress, efface, and cover up who they really are.

What I do know is that there was a way out for me. I know that I don't feel stupid anymore. I don't believe I'm defective anymore. I don't hurt the way I hurt that day in my room with that bottle of pills anymore. There was for me, and there is for you, a way to, as the philosopher Judith Butler wrote, "work the trap that one is inevitably in." Normal must be resisted if you are ever going to live your life, as who you are, fully, in all your complexity.

The closet encouraged reading.

'Dreams From My Father' reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they're dead. Perhaps more than it intends, it shows his mind working, in real time, sentence by sentence, in what feels like a private audience with the reader.

people don't always understand their own true desires and feelings, and, even if they do, they might not give a straight answer.

Now I couldn't care less. I just feel like I can write what I want to write, but don't feel I have anything to prove anymore. I think it's very much internal. I don't care about how others judge me.

You're still trying to be the kid your parents wanted.

They may disagree on a lot of things, but they regard lying and making stuff up as a firing offense.

Be yourself. Always be yourself. If people can't penetrate unimportant surface issues, they're never going to appreciate your fundamental qualities anyway.

Follow your passion. Nothing - not wealth, success, accolades or fame - is worth spending a lifetime doing things you don't enjoy.

A leader should never try to be all things to all people. A leader should be content to be what he or she is. Leaders must have the strength to know what they cannot be if they are to have the courage to be themselves.

What all four stories tell us is that there comes a time for each of us when we must make an ultimate decision as to who we are. It is a moment of existential truth. Lot is a Hebrew, not a citizen of Sodom. Eliezer is Abraham's servant, not his heir. Joseph is Jacob's son, not an Egyptian of loose morals. Moses is a prophet, not a priest. To say yes to who we are, we have to have the courage to say no to who we are not. Pain

Peace comes when we see our reflection in the face of God and let go of the desire to be someone else.

Do you think I'm wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a petrified maple. No, he said. Why? Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it's only noon. You couldn't be something that hundreds of others are.

I'm not funny. People assume that because my books are funny, I'll be funny in real life. It's the inevitable disappointment of meeting me.

My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, sloppy reflection of who I am.

Chaudron knew his forgeries would be examined under a microscope and the latest infrared X-ray. This hidden imagery would make it appear that each forgery was indeed authentic.

In the end, it's not the stories we tell that matter, but the stories we live.

I wasn't pretty, but as my mother once said, prettiness wasn't my profession.

It was Nathaniel's boundless capacity for stating the obvious that made him so charmingly human.

Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.

We don't share our thoughts, we share carefully sanitized, watered-down versions of them, Hollywood adaptations of those thoughts dumbed down for the PG-13 crowd.

Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are not for public consumption, because they would either be hurtful or else just make us look like the selfish and unkind bastards we are. We don't share thoughts, we share carefully sanitized, watered-down versions of them.

In The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper, Wayne is talking to Joe about "days that matter". Wayne says, "It's simple really. We were doing what we wanted to do, instead of what we expected ourselves to do.