Quotes About Authenticity

Because we never say anything real to each other. We play games, and we talk about games, and we talk about making games, and we don't know each other at all." He was about to tell her that that was bullshit, that no two people had ever shared more of their lives together. That if she didn't know him, no one knew him, and he might as well not exist.

Does it count for anything that I just told you I love you?" Gable asked. I considered this briefly before deciding that it didn't. "Not really. Not when I know you don't mean it.

An "online presence" is "all the true things and all the lies about a person on the Internet.

I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires.

Real love' is not just instinct, but intent.

People tell boring lies about politics, God, and love. You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book? —A.J.F.

Sam had dark curly hair that he wore parted in the middle and bluntly cut, just above his shoulders. He wore cheap John Lennon–style wire-rimmed glasses and one of those rough hemp striped parkas that are sold in Mexico. His blue jeans were holey and faded to almost white, and he paired his Teva sandals with thick white athletic socks.

But people —the ordinary, the decent and basically honest— couldn't get through the day without that one indispensable bit of programming, that allowed you to say one thing and mean, feel, even do, another.

There is no Allison Springs, Maine, but I can attest to the reality of Boca Raton, Florida: I grew up there.

We had both heard worse. People were often the worst versions of themselves in the months leading up to a wedding. Occasionally, though, the worst version of someone was the actual version of someone, but it was difficult to know if one was in that situation until after the fact.

Despite everything that transpired at Unfair Games on December 4th, 2005, and despite evidence to the contrary, it is not an inevitability that we should be our worst selves behind the mask of an avatar.

No one else seems as real as he does.

She never says she loves a book if she doesn't.

The Alice Montague I love is not the kind of woman who uses her body to get what she wants." Her eyes widened in surprise. "What?" he asked insolently. "Y-you just said you love me.

This was a hard-won but brilliant education: I had realized, as life is always willing to instruct, that the world as we see it is only the published version. The subterranean realms, whether churches or hospital rooms or smoke-filled basements, are part of what holds up the rest. The realized life versus the external picture of it: the assumption and projections that we all make about other people's lives.

When I wept and told him I was afraid I was too intense, too much, he interrupted my tears and said, "If someone came down from above and told me I could keep only one thing about you, it would be your too-muchness.

You're Only the fairest when your fairest to yourself

There is nothing wrong with projecting this false self to the outside world during these early striving years, so long as it isn't too distant or disconnected from who we really are. Later, in the forties and fifties, it becomes imperative to find our way back to the truest things we know and to compose a more authentic self. Now

And somewhere between the late thirties and early forties when we enter midlife, we also have the opportunity for true adulthood, whereupon we proceed either to wither inside our husks or to regather and re-pot ourselves for the flowering into our full authenticity.

To come through this authenticity crisis, we must reexamine our purposes and reevaluate how to spend our resources from now on. "Why am I doing all this?" "What do I really believe in?" No matter what we have been doing, there will be parts of ourselves that have been suppressed and now need to find expression. "Bad" feelings will demand acknowledgment along with the good.

What is disassembling is that narrow self we have thus far put together in a form tailored to please the culture and other people.

Many of us are not consciously aware of such fears. With enough surface bravado to fool the people we meet, we fool ourselves as well. But the memory of formlessness is never far beneath. So we hasten to try on life's uniforms

50, there is a new warmth and mellowing. Friends become more important than ever, but so does privacy. Since it is so often proclaimed by people past midlife, the motto of this stage might be "No more bullshit.

To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment