Quotes About Authenticity

And the things you said, the walk from chapel to the schoolhouse, your backpack, tests, these were a bridge running above the rushing water of what you actually felt. The goal was: learn to ignore what's down below. Fine if you met someone else who was the same as you, but you had to realize that nothing another person could do would make you feel better about any of it.

It is not a camera, or a reporter, that makes something, real and genuine; more often, a camera or a reporter does the opposite.

don't blame myself for the broad general failures for which I am held responsible by my detractors. To others, I am a symbol; to myself, I have only ever been me.

Oh come on—as if there's a clear distinction between real and fake for any of us. Aren't we all performing the role of ourselves?

It all depended on what their grandmother was really like, inside herself where she was who she really was. Not outside. Dicey knew about the difference between outside and inside.

I enjoy almost everything I do, perhaps because when I don't enjoy something, I don't do it. I enjoy writing; I enjoy teaching; I enjoy having a family to live among. I am neither a feminist nor an antifeminist, because it seems to me that we are first human beings and after that men and women. Human beings have, so far, proved interesting enough to keep me busy just trying to figure out what might be right and true about them.

Ideas, he knew from experience, arrived in their own good time, dressed exactly the way they wanted to be and saying only as much as they felt like.

Dicey had a picture in her head of Sammy putting on a mask every morning, to wear all day long. It was a heavy iron mask, and he pulled it around his own face and bolted it closed.

Always resemble yourself.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. [ The New Statesman , February 25, 1933]

The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person...

Horrors might burst out of them. But something must burst out, sometimes, if men are not machines.

The feelings I don't have I don't have. The feelings I don't have, I won't say I have. The felings you say you have, you don't have. The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have.

Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity.

The mighty question arises upon us, what is one's own real self? It certainly is not what we think we are and ought to be.

She felt unpeeled and rather exposed. She felt almost improper.

Be a good animal,true to your instincts.

Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.

She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.

My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily.

In the short summer night she learned so much. She would have thought a woman would have died of shame... She felt, now, she had come to the real bedrock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked an unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how onself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

What one does in one's art, that is the breath of one's being. What one does in one's life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.

How she hated words, always coming between her and her life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the live-sap out of living things.