Quotes About Authenticity

I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?

This is how I feel, I can't name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?-- this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it's perilously close to 'Do you like me? Please like me,' which you know quite well that 99% of all the interhuman manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obscene.

Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.

You'll stop worrying what others think about you when you realize how seldom they do.

My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I've decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there. . . . Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?

If you are an adolescent, here is the trick to being neither quite a nerd nor quite a jock: be no one. It is easier than you think.

Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval.

Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. 'Love' is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.

I am also concerned not to come off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is more like confused.

That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.

I balked at trying antidepressants, I just couldn't see myself taking pills to try to be less of a fraud.

What you do is you hide your deep need to hide, and you do this out of the need to appear to other people as if you have the strength not to care how you appear to others.

It's got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.

Everybody who really wants to knows what's true. Most people just don't want to. It means listening from deep inside. Most people just don't want to. But the special people listen. You can hear what's true, inside. Listen.

It's like there's some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy.

That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

The fraud part of me was always there, just as a puzzle piece, objectively speaking, is a true piece of the puzzle even before you see how it fits.

In short, not only was it surprising to be greeted in person with such enthusiastic words, but it was doubly surprising when the person reciting these words displayed the same kind of disengagement as, say, the checkout clerk who utters the words 'Have a nice day' while her expression indicates that it's really a matter of total indifference to her whether you drop dead in the parking lot outside ten seconds from now.

The fact is that we're all lonely, of course. Everyone knows this, it's almost a cliché. So yet another layer of my essential fraudulence is that I pretended to myself that my loneliness was special, that is was uniquely my fault because I was somehow especially fraudulent and hollow.

If you are an adolescent, here is the trick to being neither quite a nerd nor quite a jock: be no one.

An ad that pretends to be art is—at absolute best—like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This

Trying to be anti-cool is just one exponent off trying to be cool -- it's the same beast.

Irony tyrannizes us. All US irony is based on an implicit 'I don't really mean what I'm saying.

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality, and that if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.