Quotes About Authenticity

Thank you 'adults who wear back packs' for letting me know that I don't have to take you seriously

O amor só mente para dizer maior verdade.

I'm just telling you to live in [the world]. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it.

As it happened, I didn't grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn't we do this, didn't we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.

I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.

I am what I am. To look for 'reasons' is beside the point.

the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.

During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn't think. All I knew then was what I couldn't do. All I knew then was what I wasn't, and it took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer.

You see the point. I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers.

He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them

Just so. I am what I am. To look for "reasons" is beside the point.

Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.

I am what I am. To look for «reasons» is beside the point.

Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.

To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

I'm only myself in front of my typewriter.

Out where the skies are a trifle bluer Out where friendship's a little truer That's where the West begins.

our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable "I.

herself that he was not just trying to please

So, in the end, we were hypocrites for kindness. Both of us. Standing with my bouquet of orange blossoms, I thought: I'm happy but I'm in disguise. But probably many people feel that at their weddings.