Quotes About Authenticity

I didn't and don't want to be a 'feminine' version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be the heroes themselves.

For the girls with messy hair and thirsty hearts.

I'm not myself, she offered, guiltily. She softened around Tik Tok, and when she did she was, for those rare moments, girlish. He smiled. You can never say that. You're just a piece of yourself right now that you don't like.

Many people in the village wanted her to be more of a girl, and Peter had wanted her to be large and brave but a little less large and brave than him. But Pine Sap was sure enough to want her to be exactly who she was.

Someone real, I hear myself saying. Someone who never has to pretend, and who I never have to pretend around. Someone who's smart, but knows how to laugh at himself. Someone who would listen to a symphony and start to cry, because he understands music can be too big for words. Someone who knows me better than I know myself. Someone I want to talk to first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Someone I feel like I've known my whole life, even if I haven't.

I've always sort of wondered: If everyone else's opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?

People ask all the time how I'm doing, but the truth is, they don't really want to know.

Suddenly this is all too hard. I am tired of putting up walls. I want someone with the strength - and the honesty - to break them down.

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were?

Here's a news flash for the ladies: for every one of you who thinks we all want a girl like Angelina Jolie, all skinny elbows and angles, the truth is, we'd rather curl up with someone like Charlotte - a woman who's soft when a guy wraps his arms around her; a woman who might have a smear of flour on her shirt the whole day and not notice or care, not even when she goes out to meet with the PTA; a woman who doesn't feel like an exotic vacation but is the home we can't wait to come back to.

The saddest day in the world will be the one when she stops pretending.

To be truly popular, it has to look like something you are, when in reality, it's what you make yourself.

What's the difference between spending your life trying to be invisible, or pretending to be the person you think everyone wants you to be? Either way, you're faking.

I have never fit into this town, this marriage, this skin. I am the child who was picked last to play tag; I am the girl who laughed although she did not get the joke; I am the piecemeal part of you that you pretend doesn't exist, except it is all I am, all the time.

Infatuation's just another word for not seeing clearly. When you start to love a person- that's when they become real

you're not a bad person because you want to be yourself.

When you showed someone how you felt, it was fesh and honest. Whe you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.

And, after all, what is a lie? 'Tis but the truth in masquerade.

when they look at me, I so badly want to be who they see.

When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.

I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has its own zip code...You don't love someone because they're perfect...You love them in spite of the fact that they're not.

You know, he told me once, completely exasperated, you've got one glass of water inside your head, with all the tears for a lifetime. If you waste them over nothing, then you won't be able to cry for real when you need to.

a public persona that might be different from what we truly feel inside... everyone wonders if they are good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, no matter how old they are. It is an archetypical moral dilemma - Do you act like yourself and risk becoming an outcast?

I imagine how cool it would be if all small talk wasn't lies.