Quotes About Authenticity

In musical performances one can sense that the person on stage is having a good time even if they're singing a song about breaking up or being in a bad way. For an actor this would be anathema, it would destroy the illusion, but with singing one can have it both ways. As a singer, you can be transparent and reveal yourself on stage, in that moment, and at the same time be the person whose story is being told in the song. Not too many kinds of performance allow that.

You can't become normal by pretending you are.

Memory becomes not a faculty but a coconspirator, a tool for constructing the self that we show the world.

And because I had been in some tight corners before and had known real fear, if I found something that was true, I was happy to just write it up and deal with the fallout. No big.

Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons, they access them. Was I faking it then, or am I faking it now? Which, you might ask, of my two selves did I make up?

You have to utilize who you are in your work. Nobody else can do that: nobody else can pull from your background, from your parents, your upbringing, your whole life experience.

it's bad for you to hold in your feelings too much. You've a right to them.

I'm frightened of nothing anymore," answered Fell simply, "except lies. For they're the real killers.

It is okay to be flawed and defective, or even wonderful

The tension between what is and what ought to be drives the growls against hypocrisy and the satirization of the self-satisfied and uptight.

Every man knows that his highest purpose in life cannot be reduced to any particular relationship. If a man prioritizes his relationship over his highest purpose, he weakens himself, disserves the universe, and cheats his woman of an authentic man who can offer his full, undivided presence.

A fearful man who knows he is fearful is far more trustable than a fearful man who isn't aware of his fear.

The key is to get to know people and trust them to be who they are. Instead, we trust people to be who we want them to be - and when they're not, we cry.

Whenever somebody says they need an angle for their story I always fear that they've got an idea and they want me to fit into it or they want me to come up with an idea myself or I'm supposed to be more revealing than I've been, and to me it just sounds like something I don't want to do.

People always love and respect characters who speak the truth, even if the truth hurts.

I struggle with the fact that who I am has often been hidden behind stories that I tell myself derived from my perceptions of others' thoughts, statements, actions, or indifference.

If we could be participants in, rather than creators of, our lives, we'd let go of most of the judgements, critiques, fears, and doubts that keep us from loving life.

I welcomed who I was and left behind who I was not.

Its impossible to invest your soul in a compromise.

If you try to fit the mold of your organization too much, the rap will be that you are too dull or too dry or too sycophantic. So you might as well be yourself and get points for having the courage of your own style.

Be yourself, but disarm potential critics where you can by being self-deprecating.

Our world is being shaken to its very foundations. Instead of offering great thoughts about God, the meaning of reality, and the gospel, there are evangelical churches that are offering only little therapeutic nostrums that are sweet but mostly worthless. One even wonders whether some current churchgoers might even be resistant were they to encounter a Christianity that is deep, costly, and demanding.

Could it be that they were sick enough at this point of their own lives to get worked up about those of others? That's always the case. We live under the dictates of others' desires. Natalie and François didn't want to become a TV series for their crowd. For the moment, they loved the idea of being two people alone in the world, in the most perfect cliché of romantic schmaltzy serenity.

En ocasiones tenemos que actuar de forma sorprendente, derrapar y salirnos de lo cotidiano en cierto modo, para saber lo que el otro piensa realmente de nosotros.