Quotes About Authenticity

I think that if we just listen to ourselves we know what it is we have to do . . . . And I have come o think that however much it hurts, however hard it is, we have to listen. We have to live our lives.

At the heart of such a view of authenticity is a belief that indigenous cultures cannot change, cannot recreate themselves and still claim to be indigenous. Nor can they be complicated, internally diverse or contradictory. Only the West has that privilege

The reach of imperialism into 'our heads' challenges those who belong to colonized communities to understand how this occurred, partly because we perceive a need to decolonize our minds, to recover ourselves, to claim a space in which to develop a sense of authentic humanity.

Western education precludes us from writing or speaking from a 'real' and authentic indigenous position

I wasn't anybody at all. And I began to get afraid that all at once maybe my eyes would break open like soap bubbles and everybody would see there wasn't anything there, just a vile mess. And I was afraid that maybe the rot inside me would break out in sores and warts, screaming: 'traitor, sinner, imposter.'" Part

Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.

All of this internet activity creates a feeling of community, a feeling of actual connection, and therefore has within in it, if you are authentic, if you are true, real risk. But what is this risk?... The risk, it might be argued, according to psychology, is to the ego, who might want a voice that is not one of many, but singular, unique. In this time of so-many-voices-talking, how does one become heard? And what, really, is important to hear?

Possibly from the outside this looks determinedly individual. Nobody realises what a mess of loneliness and inadequacy I am inside.

Once you go inside and weed through the muck, you will find the real beauty, the truth about yourself.

The natural order of things is artificial.

You must be who you are - that which you tell yourself and what you've convinced others to believe.

But trying to be genuine was harder than it seemed

I've become so numb, I can't feel you there. Become so tired, so much more aware. In becoming this, all I want to do, is be more like me. And be less like you.

My father had the rare ability to make others feel as though they were the one and only. That they were seen, heard, chosen. He would take you by the hand and say, Come with me, and for a brief or a long moment you might think you were the first person he has ever said this to. That it was you and him against the world.

Occasionally, for a fleeting, horrified moment, she caught a glimpse of herself. The shrill note in her voice. The stupid words. It was as if there were something heavy weighing on her tongue that had to be removed immediately—that expression, It's time I took matters in hand, uttered in such a phony way—and out of her mouth she plucked a big, shiny bug. And then another. And one more. Her mouth full of big, shiny bugs.

We're so quick to cut away pieces of ourselves to suit a particular relationship, a job, a circle of friends, incessantly editing who we are until we fit in.

That dichotomy between who she was and who she thought she should be was what really killed her.

My characters seem real because they are drawn from the realities of my life. I didn't have to research their pain; I just tapped into my own.

Compromise is necessary ... so long as you never give up who you are. That isn't compromise; that's spiritual death. You have to remain true to yourself.

Everybody wants me to be what they want me to be but I'm not happy when I try to fake it.

The secret is that there is no secret.

I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.

He'd been unable to discern whether this frantic bustle of hers was what it claimed to be - an ardent determination to live every remaining day to the fullest - or quite the opposite: an evasion. An equally ardent determination to distract herself, from what only she could know, and thus a complete failure to inhabit her life in the scarcest respect.

trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one.