Quotes About Authenticity

and the question is, which one is really "you

What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.

She'd risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life.

I guess it's always romantic when two people fall in love.... Even if it turns out not to be real.

I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing - being right - gets you nothing in this world. It's the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.

At the beginning he'd thought of his style as being his essence, the perfect expression of who he was inside, but lately the styles had started to feel like disguises, distractions Danny could move around behind without being seen. 27

Social media was dead, everyone agreed; self-representations were inherently narcissistic or propagandic or both, and grossly inauthentic.

And Danny got it: she was playing herself. A character: He liked these types because they pretty much told you what reactions they wanted you to have, and they liked Danny because he went ahead and had them.

Well, I'm the guy talking. Someone's always doing the talking, just a lot of times you don't know who it is or what their reasons are.

Why did people have to pretend to be what they already were?

Why study authenticity if not to seek it? Try to ring some last truth from that word before it's so leeched of meaning that becomes a word casing, a shell without a bullet. A term that can be used only inside quotation marks.

But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead.

He thought: I'm a guy who wears boots like this. It was the first thing he knew about himself.

She's calm and happy now that Scotty loves her. I can't tell if she's actually real, or if she's stopped caring if she's real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?

Dennis sold vintage weed: Humboldt Homegrown, Eureka Gold, weed from back in the day when marijuana was leafy and harsh and full of seeds but delivered a high that was the weed equivalent of vinyl: "whorled" and "crosshatched," "sonorous" and "plump" (Dennis's MFA in poetry served him well in these marketing descriptions)—in other words, authentic in ways that the bloodless, odorless tinctures that passed for weed nowadays were not.

Knowing all of this makes us one step closer to being real, but not completely. When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know it's happened?

But we all know the drill: if we eat only candy, if we cultivate our friendships and relationships primarily online, if we forget to walk to town sometimes instead of drive, a crucial part of us will wither. You don't have to read all the books on your list at once. Just pick up the one that grabs you right now. If you don't love it, put it down. Move on.

I can't tell if she's actually real, or if she's stopped caring if she's real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?

I used to stand at the lectern in my coat and tie, waving my glasses around, urging students to find the courage to become themselves. Then I'd go back to the office and lock the door and put my head down on the desk.

We aren't here on earth in order to bend over backwards to resemble everyone else. We're here to be ourselves, in all our gnarly brilliance.

At every waking moment now, I was plagued by the thought that I was living a lie.

Since then, the awareness that I was in the wrong body, living the wrong life, was never out of my conscious mind—never, although my understanding of what it meant to be a boy, or a girl, was something that changed over time.

As it turns out, we're all still learning to be men, or women, all still learning to be ourselves. pg 197

I really did "choose" to be Jim every single day, but that once I put my sword down I haven't chosen Jenny at all; I simply wake up and here I am.