Quotes About Authenticity

Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.

The real me lives in words, not in what words mean.

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself... ("You, Doctor Martin")

I don't know if I can go on spilling myself out to people—those strange strangers.

I feel myself beginning to love you instead of just need you. I don't think I have ever loved anyone in my life, not really – just needed them, wanted them to love me to possess me – to become such a part of someone I could lose my frightened self…

I love you. I wish we were real. — Anne Sexton, from a letter to Brother Dennis Farrell, 28 March 1963, A Self-Portrait in Letters, eds. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (Houghton Mifflin, 1991)

As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.

It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.

I can't be good ALL the time.

You MUST know You to do YOU!

It is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.

That was before Iris understood that there is a difference between the things you have in your head and the things you present to the world—that sometimes you have to fit yourself into certain shapes, ones other people can easily name.

Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order.

IF WE WANT to heal, we have to start getting honest with ourselves and others. Creating the possibility for more truth is up to each of us.

Our fear is like the first tile in a string of dominoes. Our denial of fear causes us to lie, to cheat, and to become people we don't even respect in order to maintain our illusion of control.

Change is the manifestation of our ability to grow and become. When it occurs in those nearest and dearest to us it is an opportunity for celebration. When it happens in ourselves, it allows us to share ourselves on a new level. When we try to protect others from the awareness of our changes, we are being dishonest. No one can care for who we are unless they know who we are.

Sometimes I don't feel as if I'm a person at all. I'm just a collection of other people's ideas," David Bowie told an interviewer in 1972, the same year he scored pop superstardom with his iconic Ziggy Stardust persona. Twenty years later, Bowie confessed that while filling auditoriums with impassioned fans back then, "I had enormous self-image problems and very low self-esteem

shapes we had to take in order to please others: the shapes that we hate. Our true selves are the selves we would have been had no one tried to break or shame or change us. Our true selves are what those who actually love us see in us. Our true selves are who we have always been, even if they have been in hiding all this time. Our true selves are who we will, in that sheer blue zone above self-loathing, always be.

Our true selves, the selves from our "times before," are waiting for us. Where to find them? In the places and activities that make us hate ourselves the least. Do you hate yourself less than usual while mountain-climbing, singing, studying, discussing lab results, visiting France? Wherever you hate yourself less is where your true self lives, where he or she feels safe to work and play.

This crisis had forced me to confront what was most important to me, rather than what I was conditioned to want, or perhaps what I had conditioned myself to want.

Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them.

care what people think

I ask no other epitaph on my tomb but "'SHE TRIED TO FOLLOW TRUTH.

My deeds must speak for me, for words are too poor.