Quotes About Authenticity

I think trying to be cool is the worst possible ambition - and I have never suffered from it.

New York will always seem more real than anything Britain has to offer. It is strange that, although the majority of British people have never seen a skate-boarding body-popper, an exploding fire-hydrant, or anybody dunk a doughnut, these things seem infinitely more immediate and happening images than that jar of Horlicks which has stood in the cupboard for 40 years

They're into something that is too big to be expressed through their clothes.

It's always the easy way out, being an existential chicken. Not really being there. It's harder, it's riskier, to be present.

You can't just say I love you, you have to LIVE I love you

If you don't like my fire, don't come around cuz I'm gonna burn one down.

True friendship consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth and value.

The dignity of truth is lost with much protesting.

What a deal of cold business doth a man misspend the better of life in!—in scattering compliments, tendering visits, gathering and venting news, following feasts and plays, making a little winter love in a dark corner.

Maybe only my fraudulence was fraudulent.

The power of it was all finally there, finally real for me.

The lie described my life better than the truth,' I added. 'Until it became a kind of truth.

Who wasn't squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said "I"; who wasn't a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life?

Trying to make normal conversation . . . I felt like a character actor trying to return to an old role.

live a double life, to love those around you while concealing your true inner self, to appear to be one person to the external world and quite another inside.

why do you think poseurs pose? Because they want to be invited to the dominion of the real, an almost magical zone of unselfed sensation, and they know their very desire for it disqualifies them. Consider that, the next time you cluck your tongue at some awful, grandiose fake. Dude just wants to feel.

identity compromises (relationships) may result...

Storytellers ought not be too tame. They ought to be wild creatures who function adequately in society. They are best in disguise. If they lose all their wildness, they cannot give us the truest joys.

What if by sheer repetition we become the person we most often pretend to be? Does that mean there is no authentic self? Are we made of habits, compressed by time, like layered rocks?

When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.

The idea was watch what I do, not what I say.

But you don't have to hate it. In fact, it can be an absolute blast. The moment you don't give a damn what they say about you because you realize they're lying is the moment you have the upper hand.

Loving talk is cheap when costly deeds are required.