Quotes About Authenticity

True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.

If dirty words frighten you...I really don't know how you have managed to live so long. People are full of dirty words. The only time they do not use them, most people I mean, is when they are describing something dirty.

It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself -- that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving.

The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself.

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance.

You face reality, not the lights. The lights go off as quickly as they come on.

One writes out of one thing only—one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

Now, from this night, this coming morning, no matter how many beds I find myself in between now and my final bed, I shall never be able to have any more of those boyish, zestful affairs--which are, really, when one thinks of it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation. People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality - for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interpose between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much), are historical and public attitudes.

The life you think you should want,' said Eric, 'is always the life that looks safest.

And there was something so artless in this smile that I had to smile back.

It is quite impossible to write a worth-while novel about a Jew or a Gentile or a Homosexual, for people refuse, unhappily, to function in so neat and one-dimensional a fashion.

The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters.

Come out, come out, wherever you are!

Giovanni looked at me. And this look made me feel that no one in my life had ever looked at me directly before.

The world tends to trap and immobilize you in the role you play; and it is not always easy—in fact, it is always extremely hard—to maintain a kind of watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.

Best advice I ever got was an old friend of mine, a black friend, who said you have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all. That's the only advice you can give anybody. And it's not advice, it's an observation.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.