Quotes About Authenticity

I hadn't lived a real life?I'd had just a model of a life. Everything I did, everything I thought , was suspended safely by strings, too high up for anyone to damage. Zero contact, zero risk. Now those strings had been cut and I was going to die, never having had a chance to live without them.

Okay. And what are your pronouns, Jeri?" Jeri found it refreshing that she asked so directly.

I was actually being sincere," Connor admits. "But I'm happy to insult you, if that's what you want.

Even though Connor can't see Hayden's face, he can hear the truth of it in his voice. There was no hint of evasion in Hayden's words. This was raw-honesty, void of Hayden's usual flip attitude. It was perhaps the first truly honest thing Connor had ever heard him say. Yes, it is an answer, Connor says. Maybe it's the best answer of all. If more people could admit they really don't know, maybe there never would have been a Heartland War.

Credit is where credit is due and to honner the trixture whose illusions finally become true

People like you because you've got integrity. Even when you're being an ass.

See, if you paint wrong because that's the best you can do, you just a chump. But you do it because you want to? Then you're an artist.

But what if your mind becomes a pathological liar?

Sie ist ein Kind der Sixties, blind der Masse zu folgen war nie ihre Sache. Stattdessen versucht sie, sich die nonkonformen Fragen der Welt zu stellen, weil konforme Fragen nur zu konformen Antworten führen.

No son los mejores sitios del mundo, ¿verdad? Tienes que luchar para que sepan que estás ahí; si no, vives una vida de mera adecuación, que es lo peor que hay.

My real name is Shawn Dobson. Will you call me that, Rowan? Will you call me by my real name?

The artist, the true artist, the true poet, should paint only in accordance with what he sees or feels. He must be really faithful to his own nature. He must avoid, like death itself, the temptation of borrowing the eyes or feelings of another man, however great, for in that case the production he gave us would be a pack of lies, relatively to himself, not realities.

Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.

Beauty is nothing, beauty won't stay. You don't know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it's for something else.

if it doesn't come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don't do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don't do it.

show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually dirty kitchen, and 5 times out of 9 I'll show you an exceptional man. show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.

I never pump up my vulgarity. I wait for it to arrive in its own terms.

God knows I am not too hippy. Perhaps because I am too much around the hip and I fear fads for, like anybody else, I like something that tends to last.

There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. Dumb fuckers. Their minds are full of shit. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.

how can you be true and kind at the same time? how?

Sometimes things are just what they seem to be and that's all there is to it.

Well it's good to have a car like that, once in a while somebody'll say, 'why don't you come over for dinner?' and I can just say, 'Car won't make it.' I don't have to tell them that time is scarcer than young pussy around here, and I don't mean time to write POETRY. I mean time to lay in bed, alone, and stare up at the ceiling and not think at all, not at all, not at all…

nothing's news. it's the same old thing in disguise. only one thing comes without a disguise and you only see it once, or maybe never. like getting hit by a freight train. makes us realize that all our moaning about long lost girls in gingham dresses is not so important after all.

How are his poems? He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.