Quotes About Authenticity

In a period when everyone was being cool in a very adolescent, self-conscious way, Syd was unfashionably outgoing; my enduring memory of our first encounter is the fact that he bothered to come up and introduce himself to me.

My rule is, whatever you were calling me four years ago is what you should be calling me now, because I don't like it when my family or close friends call me Nicki Minaj. To me I'm not Nicki Minaj when I'm with them.

You're like concrete. Completely real. Even just standing there, before you said anything, you made everything else real: the walls, the floors, what he'd done to me.

I am Aud Torvingen. Aud, rhymes with crowd.

I wanted them to learn something unique to them, that came from them, not an artificial overlay that would evaporate in the first flash of fear adrenaline if they were ever threatened.

For a while she enjoyed a life in which she behaved exactly as she should: a royal maid with no secrets.

Me, I'll just continue to pretend I'm both blind and stupid, and brightly say the things other people find foolish, and so make the truth foolish.

Sitting in the fire in the summer evening as Hild the daughter of the might-have-been king, not Hild the seer of the overking, speaking nothing but British, she felt her face setting in a new shape, happier, younger.

Show them the pattern. Give them permission to do what they wanted to do all along.

The briefcase was old, worn and comfortable. It spoke of a real person with a real life, real feelings.

They look normal, but they don't feel a goddamn thing, don't know happy from sad from a hole in the ground. They walk around smiling and frowning and pretending to feel shit, and think everyone else out there is pretending, too. No one's real to these guys, you know what I mean? I don't mind telling you, Torvingen, they scare the crap out of me.

Geordie Karp hurt people and manipulated them because they weren't real to him. He acted as if he were human, but he was a monster.

Speaking straight felt different. She found she liked it.

Conformism and non-conformism are symmetrical expressions of a lack of originality.

Let us beware of discourse where the adjective "natural" without quotation marks abounds: somebody is deceiving himself, or wants to deceive us. From natural borders to natural religion.

The most convinced reactionary is the repentant revolutionary, that is to say: the man who has known the reality of the problems and has discovered the falseness of the solutions.

Vulgarity consists in striving to be what we are not.

The individual who lies to himself, just like the society that does not lie to itself, soon rots and dies.

Das Individuum, das eine authentische Berufung hat, ist reaktionär, welcher Art die Überzeugungen auch seien, die es hegt. Demokrat ist, wer erwartet, daß die Außenwelt ihm Ziele setzt.

False elegance is preferable to genuine vulgarity. The man who dwells in an imaginary palace demands more from himself than the man who is happy with his hovel.

The modern Christian feels professionally obligated to act jovially and jokingly, to show his teeth in a cheerful grin, to profess a slavering friendliness, in order to prove to the unbeliever that Christianity is not a "somber" religion, a "pessimistic" doctrine, an "ascetic" morality. The progressive Christian shakes our hand with the wide grin of a politician running for office.

My truth is the sum of what I am, not a simple summary of what I think.

I can call nothing by name if that is not his name. I call a cat a cat, and Rollet a rogue.

Le vrai peut quelquefois n'être pas vraisemblable. (At times truth may not seem probable)