Quotes About Authenticity

No matter how self-aware you are, memoir wrenches at your insides precisely because it makes you battle with your very self – your neat analyses and tidy excuses… Your small pieties and impenetrable, mostly unconscious poses invariably trip you up. p. xxi

Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in its most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.

i wonder how many women are painting themselves into movie girls while they sleep angling their faces alien to themselves, an unnecessary surrender to things that kill them, to things that are not real I tell myself in the mirror, applying the second coat of mascara: these things are not real

You could not love a man who was always playing hide-and-seek with you; that was the lesson she had learned.

And now you'll be telling stories of my coming back and they won't be false, and they won't be true but they'll be real

And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead / children out of the fields into the text / of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.

You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul. That worrier.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Now that I'm free to be myself, who am I?

Be what you are, of the earth, but a dreamer too.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do — determined to save the only life you could save.

there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do— determined to save the only life you could save.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

I don't want to be demure or respectable. I was that way, asleep, for years. That way, you forget too many important things.

I know a lot of fancy words. I tear them from my heart and my tongue. Then I pray.

The point is, you're you, and that's for keeps.

You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul. That worrier.

Let me always be who I am, and then some.

This morning the water lilies are no less lovely, I think, than the lilies of Monet. And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead children out of the fields into the text of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.

Previously there were small shops because it was a small town. Now there are small shops because the tourists want to think they are still in that little town, which has vanished.

I was a poet, but I was away for a while from the loom of thought and formal language; I was playing. I was whimsical, absorbed, happy. Let me always be who I am, and then some.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.