Quotes About Authenticity

There's no fair swap for truth, son, not even with good intentions." -Jones

The people who denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger. They were blind sleepwalkers on tightropes, fingers scoring thin air.

If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.

But I knew one more thing. That people who denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger.

The fact is, very few of us are real imposters. And it's different from play-acting. Imposterism or imposture comes from the core of your being because there's nothing else there. Your central being never develops a self; that's not a disadvantage, entirely, though you do have to fight for your point of view, almost as if you were dead.

he said apropos of nothing one day, "No talk about 'relationships,' understood?" I think I did have the presence of mind to ask, "Why?" "It's a waste of time," he said. "The existentialists have it right. Whatever is the case, is. No amount of talk is going to change it. The only thing we have to feel responsible for to each other is to pay attention to what's happening between us. It either is or it isn't.

That year the Ribeiro's daffodils seeded early and they seeded cockroaches. Now, ecologically speaking, even a cockroach has its place -- but these suckers bit. That didn't sound Earth-authentic to me. Not that I care, mind you, all I ask is useful. I wasn't betting on that either.

Tocohl frowned, and saw Kejesli suddenly for what he was. He was a man trying not to be Sheveschkem, without conscious knowledge of what being Sheveschkem actually entailed. He spoke GalLing' but danced Sheveschkem; he wore worlds' motley, but lowered his ceiling.

Of all the things you wear, your expression is the most important.

What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject's blind self absorption and the journalist's skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.

True love is born of experience, not fairy dust.

Adults are constantly telling teenagers that it's what's on the inside that matters. It's always painful to find out that adults have lied to you.

But if Grant doesn't like you for who you are, then he's not worth it.

Perhaps it is in speaking of our falseness that we can be true.

That girl peering back at me from the water was me, just me. The real me. Not the other versions I tried to be to win anyone over. I took a breath and exhaled. I forgave myself for my prior judgments of not being good enough to be just who I was. The truth was I was just doing the best I could with what I knew at the time. But now I knew better.

For them, work is a way to afford life, but not a definition of who you are.

My schoolmates hurried home the way they always did, the bold kids scuffling and shouting and the timid, gawky ones yearning toward a brief return to their real lives in which they were their mamas' treasures instead of the dull, easily bullied children they impersonated at school.

But Mari, I just don't think I can justify a show-offish wedding. I've never been that sort of girl. I'm the 'Let's go to a third-world country and take care of orphans' kind of girl, you know?

You don't have to primp for God. He thinks you're gorgeous, even on the bad hair days.

If I hold back, I'm no good. I'm no good. I'd rather be good sometimes, than holding back all the time.

Never compromise yourself. You are all you've got.

After they see me, when their mothers are feeding them all that cashmere sweater and girdle ----- [expletive deleted by the New York Times], maybe they'll have a second thought - that they can be themselves and win.

Don't compromise yourself - you are all you've got.

Don't compromise yourself, you're all you've got.