Quotes About Authenticity

What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is the first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

Writing can't be a way of life -- the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

Where there is a believing community whose life is centered in the biblical story through its worshipping, teaching, and sacramental and apostolic life, there will certainly be differences of opinion on specific issues, certainly mistakes, certainly false starts. But it is part of my faith in the authenticity of the story itself that this community will not be finally betrayed.

The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about "what is true for me" is an evasion of the serious business of living.

The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool.

The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else while you're uncool.

You'll never catch a nudist with his pants down.

A key part of successfully being Julia, it seemed, was not giving a shit if you looked weird.

It was strange to be naked in front of anybody. It was like that cold water out there in the bay: scary, you didn't think you could stand it, but then you plunged in and pretty soon you got used to it. There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.

There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.

these were authentically coarse-woven curtains, woven by people who didn't know any other way of making curtains, who didn't even know that their way was special, and whose way was therefore not discounted and emptied of meaning in advance. This made him very happy. It was as if he'd been looking for these curtains forever, as if he'd been waiting his whole life to wake up one morning in a room in which those coarse-woven, stem-green curtains hung over the windows.

The quietness of it was weird: real fights happened without a sound track.

That was magic for you, right? The thing about magic, the real kind: it didn't make excuses, and it was never funny.

Remember what a good girl I was? Remember how meek and pleasing I was to everybody? For the first time in my life I could just be.

There's no getting away from yourself. Not even in Fillory.

Your magician self, that loopy doppelgänger, was always with you, tugging at your sleeve, whispering silently that your real life was a fake life, a crude and undignified and inauthentic charade that nobody was really buying anyway.

The year I graduated from college was the year Richard Linklater released Slacker and Douglas Coupland published Generation X . A quarter-century later it's hard to recover a sense of how radical and powerful those works were at the time, but to me they felt authentically contemporary in a way that nothing else did.

She was feeling something—a new feeling. Not even a feeling exactly, more like she wasn't feeling a lot of things that she was used to feeling. She wasn't tired, or bored, or frustrated, or wishing she was somewhere else doing something else. All that was cleared away. She still had basically no idea what was going on, but she knew she was free to be herself, right here, right now, in the moment. She couldn't wait to find out what she was going to feel next.

He wondered where this feeling was coming from, that he was improvising his part in a play that everybody else had a script for.

Remember what a good girl I was? Remember how meek and pleasing I was to everybody? For the first time in my life I could just be. That was always part of the problem, Quentin. I felt like I had to be interested in you all the time. You wanted love so desperately, and I thought it was my job to give it to you. Poor little lost boy! That's not love, that's hell. And I was getting a taste of heaven. I was a blue angel now.

It was unconventional, but conventions were there to make it easy on the fakers and cheats.

Strip the phony tinsel off Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath.

When I see a cheerful young man shrieking about how full of life he is, banging on a drum, and blowing on a tin trumpet, and speaking of his good spirits, it depresses me, since naturally it gives the contrary impression. It can't be real. It ought to be but it isn't. If the noisy person meant what he said, he wouldn't say it.

You're Only the fairest when your fairest to yourself.