Quotes About Authenticity

She likes to think this is a real memory, but she doesn't know that she isn't making it up.

Take any ten years of your life, reduce them to two pages, and every sentence has to be three words long. It's a good assignment. You can't hide behind a sapling.

Mundus vult decipi'—the world wants to be deceived. To live without deception presupposes standards beyond the reach of most people whose existence is largely shaped by compromise, evasion and mutual accommodation. Could they face their weakness, their vanity and selfishness, without a mask?

I am nothing, truth is everything.

Avoid popularity if you would have peace

The thing about quotes on the Internet is that you never know if they are genuine.

Always be wary of quotes on the internet.

Don't believe everything you see on the internet

That's right: No one cares! People have troubles of their own! It's okay. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it; it means you should do it, somehow, for its own sake, without illusions. Just write, just live, and don't care too much yourself. No one cares. It's just banter.

Today, the poetics of authenticity is securely established. There have been isolated dissents from it, but no comprehensive rejection. Yet it should be clear by now that this poetics has thoroughly failed. It has made it more difficult for poets to produce major work, and its critical legacy is remarkable only for intellectual crudity and rhetorical violence. The sound of the critical madhouse is a thousand utterly authentic voices, all talking at once.

He admired writers whose own stories were as interesting as the ones they wrote.

Man, that's the only kind of book I like – one that's so real you want to find out everything there is to know about the person who wrote it, like how tall he is and what kind of music he likes and whether or not he really went through all the stuff he was writing about.

Sejal had not often thought of her home, or of India as a whole, as cool. She was dimly aware, however, of a white Westerner habit of wearing other cultures like T-shirts—the sticker bindis on club kids, sindoor in the hair of an unmarried pop star, Hindi characters inked carelessly on tight tank tops and pale flesh. She knew Americans liked to flash a little Indian or Japanese or African. They were always looking for a little pepper to put in their dish.

In the words of Dr. Seuss: Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!

The thing about you, her mother used to say, is that you never act out of character. You have no originality. But Nigora knew this was not true. Because she was going to act out of character, She was going (thought Nigora) to be herself. And yet: how could she? How could she?

Here are people who refused to cheat, who eagerly sought out the truth and shrank from neither poetry nor terror, the two poles of our globe - since poetry does exist in the world, in certain events, at rare moments. And there's also no shortage of terror.

If I don't make it, don't let them cast some asshole to play me in the movie version of this

You can sing all you want about how you love Jesus, you can have crocodile tears in your eyes, but the consecration that doesn't reach your purse has not reached your heart.

This is the problem with branding: it has become more important than the thing it purports to brand.

A cassock does not make a man a priest, any more than a fine dress makes a woman truly beautiful - or good or generous or intelligent. Don't confuse the way someone looks with the way they are.

I have decided that love is only real and true when it makes you feel safe.

There wasn't time for artifice; their connection was the destination, not the dance that preceded it.

Ciro carried himself like a general in full regalia, when in fact he wore secondhand clothes from the donation bin.

A cassock does not make a man a priest, any more than a fine dress makes a woman truly beautiful—or good or generous or intelligent. Don't confuse the way someone looks with the way they are. Grace is a rare thing.