Quotes About Authenticity

Because of an imaginary voice, Nicholas had become a whole person; rather than the partial person he had been in Berkeley. If he had remained in Berkeley he would have lived and died a partial person, never knowing completeness.

Where are you going? Won't you come downstairs and—be with me? There was the most shocking news on TV; Buster Friendly claims that Mercer is a fake. What do you think about that, Rick? Do you think it could be true?" "Everything is true," he said. "Everything anybody has ever thought.

He wished to god he had a horse, in fact any animal. Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one. And yet from a social standpoint it had to be done, given the absence of the real article.

It's all on the surface. Advantage of wealth and power makes this available to them, but it's ersatz as the day is long.

In comparison to my life in the inter-connected dreams, this life is lonely and phony and worthless; unfit for an intelligent and educated person.

Mercer doesn't have to do anything alien to him. He suffers but at least he isn't required to violate his own identity.

verisimilitude.

He started toward the door, then halted briefly. To the two of them he said, 'Is the owl genuine?' Rachael glanced swiftly at the elder Rosen. 'He's leaving anyhow,' Eldon Rosen said. 'It doesn't matter; the owl is artificial. There are no owls.

Siempre que hablaba de ti, en realidad, no describía nada. Como si nunca te viera realmente. Como si nadie fuera real de verdad para mí.

Maybe you're an android, Officer Crams said. With a false memory, like they give them. Had you thought of that?

Chuckling, Barris inspected his patty melt, which was melted imitation cheese and fake ground beef on special organic bread. "What kind of bread is this?" he asked.

Originality is being different from oneself, not others.

No,' he said, 'memory's a poor thing to have. It's your own real hair and mouth and arms and eyes and hands I want. I didn't know I could ever love anything so much...

If you want to write anything that works, you have to go with the grain of your talent, not against it. If your talent is inert and sullen in the face of business or politics...but takes fire at the thought of ghosts and vampires and witches and demons then feed the flames, feed the flames.

That's what you are. Argue with anything else, but don't argue with your own nature.

If I'm reading something I happen to know and gets it wrong, I just don't trust the book any more. What I ask of a novel I'm reading is that it should know a fraction more about the things I know than I do. When I'm writing...I ask myself: would I be convinced by this if I read it? If I knocked against this bit of scenery, would it feel solid?

Lyra learns to her great cost that fantasy isn't enough. She has been lying all her life, telling stories to people, making up fantasies, and suddenly she comes to a point where that's not enough. All she can do is tell the truth. She tells the truth about her childhood, about the experiences she had in Oxford, and that is what saves her. True experience, not fantasy - reality, not lies - is what saves us in the end.

Mr. Scoresby...told me there were truthtellers, and they needed to know what the truth was, so as to tell it. And there were liars, and they needed to know what the truth was, so they could change it or avoid it. And there were bullshitters, who didn't care about the truth at all. They weren't interested. What they spoke wasn't the truth and it wasn't lies; it was bullshit. All they were interested in was their own performance.

Just be yourself. You don't have to put on an act. To be myself, I have to put on an act, Ginny said bitterly. What's that mean? It means I don't know who I am.

Streite mit allem, was du willst, aber nicht mit deiner eigenen Natur

She was not beautiful—she would never be that, nor pretty, nor conventionally attractive…

La respuesta emocional del lector es algo muy valioso. Los relatos tienen que ganarse sus propias lágrimas, sin hurtarlas de ningún otro sitio.

There are no reasons. She is obliged to be as she is. We all are. Reasons are in books.

Dreams? If only they had been! But I don't need dreams, Doctor, that's why I hardly have them—because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight!