Quotes About Authenticity

Very few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibilityto be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

I felt a bit awkward about the tears, but they were real enough.

I hate saying anything to a group of people. When I talk to a group of people I always have to single out one and talk to him, and all the while I am talking I feel the others are peering at me and taking unfair advantage. I also hate people to ask cheerfully how you are when they know you're feeling like hell and expect you to say 'Fine'.

I told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film primière, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed. After Doreen left, I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should anymore. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.

Seré una de las pocas poetisas en el mundo completamente feliz de ser mujer, no una de esas amargadas y frustradas, retorcidas imitadoras de hombres, que en su mayoría acaban destrozadas

I felt very low. I had been unmasked only that morning by Jay Cee herself and I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn't hide the truth much longer. After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.

I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week.

talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever.

I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicious I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn't hide the truth much longer.

Me sentía deprimida. Había sido desenmascarada esa misma mañana por la propia Jota Ce y sentía ahora que todas las incómodas sospechas que tenía sobre mí misma se confirmaban y que no podría ocultar la verdad por mucho más tiempo. Al cabo de diecinueve años de correr tras buenas calificaciones y premios y becas de una u otra clase, estaba abandonando, disminuyendo la velocidad, saliéndome abiertamente de la carrera.

Face it, kid: unless you can be yourself, you won't stay with anyone for long.

Writing on the side (she says ambitiously.) But to write you have to live, don't you?

It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of non-feeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out.

Wear your heart on your skin in this life." ? Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts

It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world

I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.

I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?

Hadn't my own mother told me that as soon as she and my father left Reno on their honeymoon—my father had been married before, so he needed a divorce—my father said to her, 'Whew, that's a relief, now we can stop pretending and be ourselves

got depressed with the ending on Tuesday: four pages of anti-climactic question and answer between Doctor and Sara, dry and chopped logical as an adding machine: now, you've decided this, how do you feel about that. Bad as a rich involved poem with a bare flat two-line moral tacked on the end: this is the truth kiddies

A real self, as we know, is a rare thing. The direct speech of a real self is rarer still. Where a real self exists it reveals itself, as a rule, only in the quality of the person's presence, or in actions

I must write about the things of the world with no glazing." She fought doggedly against the great suction into her own subjectivity: "I shall perish if I can write about no one but myself." Something like this went through nearly every entry in her journal over long periods. In

At least it gets me out of that incredible sense of constriction which I have on trying to find subjects for small bad poems, and feeling always that they should be perfect, which gives me that slick shiny artificial look.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.