Quotes About Authenticity

This is no honky-tonk parade. 1Q84 is the real world, where a cut draws real blood, where pain is real pain and fear is real fear. The moon in the sky is no paper moon.

The more honest I try to be, the more the right words recede into the distance.

Just speak your mind honestly. That's the best thing. It may hurt a little sometimes, and someone may get upset, but in the long run, it's for the best.

Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas - none of them bother me. I don't care what banner they raise. But what I can't stand are hollow people. When I'm with them I just can't bare it, and wind up saying things I shouldn't.

No, I don't think I've been defiled. But I haven't been saved, either. There's nobody who can save me right now, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. The world looks totally empty to me. Everything I see around me looks fake. The only thing thay isn't fake is that gooshy thing inside me.

I was alive in the past, and I'm alive now, sitting here talking to you. But what you see here isn't really me. This is just a shadow of who I was. You are really living. But I'm not. Even these words I'm saying right now sound empty, like an echo.

No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves

Don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality.

Without a true self, a person can not go on living. It is like the ground we stand on. Without the ground, we can build nothing.

Nobody would take the time and effort to hang a fake moon in a real sky.

Its Barnum & Bailey world just as phony as it can be, But it would't be make-believe if you believed in me

I don't think I'd want Mickey Mouse pimping for me anyway.

I don't know, I feel like this isn't the real world. The people, the scene: they just don't seem real to me.

No hay más remedio que ser lo más honesto posible con uno mismo. Ser honesto y, al menos, vivir con cierta libertad. No sé si te será de gran ayuda, pero es lo único que te puedo decir.

Most of these university types are total phonies. They're scared to death somebody's gonna find they don't know something. They all read the same books and they all throw around the same words, and they get off listening to John Coltrane and seeing Pasolini movies. You call that 'revolution'? That does it for me, then. I'm not going to believe in any damned revolution. Love is all I'm going to believe in.

They were too clear and detailed to have been a fantasy, and too whole and beautiful to have been real.

I have to somehow get connected to reality again, he thought, or else I won't be me anymore. I'll become a man who doesn't exist.

Writing honestly is very difficult. The more I try to be honest, the farther my words sink into darkness. -from Hear the Wind Sing

We had been playing our assigned roles on the office stage, but stepping down from the stage, abandoning the images that we had been projecting there, we were both just unstable, awkward lumps of flesh, warm pieces of meat kitted out with digestive tracts and hearts and brains and reproductive organs.

It wasn't what I'd characterize as a happy part of my life, living as I was, a balled-up mass of unfulfilled desires. I was much younger, much hungrier, much more alone. But I was myself, pared down to the essentials.

I was living someone else's life, not my own. How much of this person I called myself was really me? And how much was not? These hands clutching the steering wheel - what percentage of them could I really call my own? The scenery outside - how much of it was real? The more I thought about it, the less I seemed to understand.

But Aomame could never smile easily, or casually, in front of people. When she forced it, she ended up with a tight sneer, which made others even more tense and uncomfortable. Tamaki was different: she had a natural, cheerful smile. People meeting her for the first time immediately felt friendly toward her. In the end, though, disappointment and despair drove Tamaki to take her own life, leaving Aomame – who couldn't manage a decent smile – behind.

I probably still haven't completely adapted to the world. I don't know, I feel like this isn't the real world. The people, the scene: they just don't seem real to me.

No matter how far you go, you can never be anything but yourself.