Quotes About Authenticity

It is such hard work to keep your heart hidden! And worse, by the time you find it easy, it will be harder still to show it.

who am i, really? What does any of it mean? i'm so afraid someday everyone will see that i'm just an imposter, a fake, among all the real and gorgeous godheads. -

Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself. You'll never wish you'd held back a little more.

It's the most marvelous and terrible thing in the world. Everyone, but everyone, is pretending to be someone else.

My mistress used to say that you couldn't ever really be naked unless you wanted to be. She said: even if you've taken off every stitch of clothing, you still have your secrets, your history, your true name. It's quite difficult to be really naked. You have to work hard at it.

I readied myself for the great effort of speaking with the throat-and-belly instead of the mind-and-heart. It is altogether a different skill.

My mistress used to say that you couldn't ever really be naked unless you wanted to be. She said, 'Even if you've taken off every stitch of clothing, you still have your secrets, your history, your true name. It's quite difficult to be really naked. You have to work hard at it. Just getting into a bath isn't being naked, not really. It's just showing skin. And foxes and bears have skin, too, so I shan't be ashamed if they're not.

Mary's smile is a spotlight—whomever it lands upon becomes brighter, becomes more real. It lands upon us.

IN LUDO VERITAS. In the Game Is Truth.

St. Oscar says SCRAM to all that. Just be trash together and love as long as you can and then stop when you can't anymore and be trash separately.

You and I, we're no good at telling a story straight. It won't come off right. Like a dog reciting a sonnet. Impressive, but how much better to let him howl?

még ha le is vetsz minden egyes ruhadarabot, rajtad maradnak a titkaid, a történeted, a valódi neved. Meglehet?sen nehéz valóban mezítelenné válni. Keményen meg kell dolgoznod érte. Megfürdeni nem jelent egyet a p?reséggel, nem igazán. Csak megmutatod a b?rödet. A rókáknak és a medvéknek is van b?rük, így aztán nem szégyellem magam, ha ?k sem.

It is such a hard work to keep your heart hidden! And worse, bt the time you find it easy, it will be harder still to show it.

Dress you? I'd rather undress you. We don't belong together. But you belong to me. I want you not as you might be. I want you as you are.

I challenge anyone not to feel worn down after weeks and months of having to be grateful. When there is little enough left of your true self, somehow the gratitude feels like the last straw. Or

The relationship between Cathy and Mom in the strip is the one relationship drawn from real life that I have proudly never even tried to disguise.

Readers, teachers, and editors told me in so many words that I should write whatever felt true to my heart but that since I was Asian, I might as well stick to the subject of Asians, even though no one cared about Asians, but what choice did I have since if I wrote about, say, nature, no one would care because I was an Asian person writing about nature?

In the past, I was encouraged to write about my Asian experience but I still had to write it the way a white poet would—so instead of copying a white poet, I was copying a white poet copying their idea of an Asian poet.

I don't think, therefore I am—I hurt, therefore I am. Therefore, my books are graded on a pain scale. If it's 2, maybe it's not worth telling my story. If it's 10, maybe my book will be a bestseller.

In the mid-aughts, there was even a short-lived movement called New Sincerity, where artists and writers thought that it would be a radical idea to feel. "To feel" entailed regressing to one's own childhood, when there was no Internet and life was much purer and realer. Though they prized authenticity above all else, they stylized their work in a vaguely repellent faux-naïf aesthetic that dismissed politics for shoe-gazing self-interest.

Even to declare that I'm writing for myself would still mean I'm writing to a part of me that wants to please white people. I didn't know how to escape it.

not (the curse of anyone nonwhite is that you are so busy arguing what you're not that you never arrive at what you are).

Myung Mi Kim was the first poet who said I didn't need to sound like a white poet nor did I have to "translate" my experiences so that they sounded accessible to a white audience. No other mentor afterwards was as emphatic about this idea as her.

Overhaul the tired ethnic narratives that have automated our identities; that have made our lives palatable to a white audience but removed them from our own lived realities—and stop spelling ourselves out in the alphabet given to us.