Quotes About Authenticity

Someone once called Lincoln two-faced. 'If I am two-faced, would I wear the face that I have now?' Lincoln asked. Abraham Lincoln wasn't much of a dancer. 'Miss Todd, I should like to dance with you in the worst way,' he told his future wife. Miss Todd later said to a friend, 'He certainly did.' John Quincy Adams was a first-rate swimmer. Once when he was skinny-dipping in the Potomac River, a women reporter snatched his clothes and sat on them until he gave her an interview.

Someone once called Lincoln two-faced. If I am two-faced, would I wear the face that I have now? Lincoln asked.

If things are better for women there, it is due to a profound and enduring social consensus that life should be made livable based on who they are and not on an abstract moralistic notion of how they ought to be.

The best actors are children and dogs because they're not acting at all." — Helen Mirren

In real life, as I mentioned in the first chapter, people don't try to have feelings, and frequently they try not to have them.

We've all heard that the unexamined life is not worth living, but consider too that the unlived life is not worth examining.

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want. MARGARET YOUNG

Agendas tend to drain the life out of relationships.

It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time.

When we forget ourselves, when we let go of being good and just settle into just being a writer, we begin to have the experience of writing through us. We retire as the self-conscious author and become something else - the vehicle for self-expression. When we are just the vehicle, the storyteller and not the point of the story, we often write very well - we certainly write more easily.

always remember that your Censor's negative opinions are not the truth.

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. MARTHA GRAHAM

In the retreat to a heterosexist conception of black identity, the jargon of racial authenticity does not repudiate but instead reveals its reliance on the white supremacist logic from which it purports to declare its independence.

One thing I have learned hard, if indeed I have learned it now: it is a reduction of our humanity to hide from pain, our own or others'. To hide from anything. That was Marian's text. Be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless. Skinless? Dance around in your bones.

To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.

He has a way of walking through conventions of that kind as if they did not exist, and being so much himself that pretty soon people begin adapting themselves to him.

He still wore, in the warming barracks, a muskrat cap with earlaps. Under it his eyes were gray as agates, as sudden as an elbow in the solar plexus.

She sounded tinny and false. Poor lady, she found it as difficult as I did to know how to act or what to say. Later, with practice, we might do better. The star had her part down cold, but the male lead didn't like his lines, and the walk-ons had never seen the script until forty minutes ago.

In fiction I think we should have no agenda except to try to be truthful. The shouters in thunder roar from their podiums and pulpits; I squeak from my corner.

Be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless. Skinless? Dance around in your bones.

The humble are they that move about the world with the lure of the real in their hearts.

To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) --but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.