Quotes About Authenticity

Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.

maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous…." - Zadie Smith

Don't romanticise your 'vocation'. You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle'. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out.

But Archie did not pluck Clara Bowden from a vacuum. And it's about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots.

or at least I felt that within the lie there was a deeper truth.

Happy is the novelist," claims Nabokov, "who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

Bitter struggles deform their participants in subtle, complicated ways. The idea that one should speak one's cultural allegiance first and the truth second (and that this is a sign of authenticity) is precisely such a deformation.

Don't mask self-doubt with contempt.

When everyone's building a fence, isn't it a true fool who lives out in the open?

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand, but tell it.

You have to be somebody," Lanier writes, "before you can share yourself." But to Zuckerberg sharing your choices with everybody (and doing what they do) is being somebody.

Still starving themselves, still reading women's magazines that explicitly hate women, still cutting themselves with little knives in places they think can't be seen, still faking their orgasms with men they dislike, still lying to everybody about everything.

Chuck functions here as a kind of authenticity fetish, allowing Hans (and the reader) the nostalgic pleasure of returning to a narrative time when symbols and mottoes were full of meaning and novels weren't neurotic, but could aim themselves simply and purely at transcendent feeling.

It's about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots.

and had a mauvais quart d'heure wondering whether she herself had any personality at all or was in truth only the accumulation and reflection of all the things she had read in books and seen on television.

But i cannot be worrying-worrying all the time about the *truth*. I have to worry about the truth that can be *lived with*.

Or maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous.

but to create a real feeling—made

And were they still like that, she wondered--these new girls, this new generation? Did they still feel one thing and do another? Did they still only want to be wanted? Were they still objects of desire instead of--as Howard might put it--desiring subjects?

Don't give me face! How you be offended? You know! Is truth!

You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something.

A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow. When

For the first time in months, she got dressed without attention to anything else except the basic practical covering of her body. She didn't do her hair. No make-up. No contact lenses. No heels. How much time she saved! How much more she would get done in this new life!