Quotes About Authenticity

It's a very American trait, this wanting people to think well of us. It's a young want, and I am ashamed of it in myself. I am not always a good daughter, even though my lacks are in areas different from her complaints. Haven't I learned yet that the desire to be perfect is always disastrous and, at the least, loses me in the mire of false guilt?

Maybe I don't like being different, Meg said. but I don't want to be like everybody else, either.

Who makes you least confused? Calvin There was no hesitation here. When I'm with Calvin, I don't mind being me You mean he makes you more you, don't you? I guess you could put it that way.

The part of us that has to be burned away is something like the deadwood on the bush; it has to go, to be burned in the terrible fire of reality, until there is nothing left but . . . what we are meant to be.

You're much too straightforward to be able to pretend to be what you aren't," Mrs. Murry said.

Madeleine L'Engle

If she wanted to write Christian fiction, how was she to go about it? I told her that if she is truly and deeply a Christian, what she writes is going to be Christian, whether she mentions Jesus or not. And if she is not, in the most profound sense, Christian, then what she writes is not going to be Christian, no matter how many times she invokes the name of the Lord.

I've looked for an image in someone else's mirror, and so have avoided seeing myself.

What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.

We are all broken, we human creatures, and to pretend we're not is to inhibit healing.

Maybe I don't like being different," Meg said, "but I don't want to be like everybody else, either.

When have you been most you, the very most you?

Why can't I hide it, too? Meg thought. Why do I always have to show everything?

It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.

When two people, lovers, or sometimes friends, have an enduring care for each other, allow each other to be human, faulted, flawed, but real, then being human becomes a glorious thing to be. If the human race ever makes progress, that is how.

When a character wants to do one thing and I want him to do another, the character is usually right.

They can't understand plain, ordinary love when they see it.

I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one's solitude right, this is the prize.

I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty.

You young people are always so obsessed with truth. The truth is often overrated.

Be who you seem to be.

It is not your job to make other people comfortable with who you are.

What is embarrassment but a relative of fear? You've been seen—caught—at being imperfect.

I tell you these stories because these things happen to everyone. It's not about being starched or polished or cute or polite. It's about having ears that stick out, about breaking yet another glass. It's about seeing something for the first time and making a million mistakes and not ever getting completely discouraged.