Quotes About Authenticity

No woman has ever granted me all the privileges I need—and you, why you sing out so blithely, so boldly, with a laugh even—yes, you invite me to go ahead, be myself, venture anything. I adore you for that. That is where you are truly regal, a woman extraordinary.

Am I creating my own isolation? It seems to me that most of my acts are acts of integrity. So much takes place within me each day that by comparison I find a paucity, a stinginess, a silence in people which drives me to excess.

Laughter and tears are not separate experiences, with intervals of rest: they rush out together and it is like walking with a sword between your legs.

I gave away my mystery, knowing I shouldn't, yet incapable of anything else.

Now that I have been truthful I am no longer anxious. Anaïs

For the first time, in Golconda, she had practiced Larry's choice of withdrawing if the people were not of quality. Of preferring solitude to the effort of pretending he was interested in them.

Speak for yourself, always. It is lack of confidence. You can say things as well as Dostoevsky, Elie Faure or anybody you quote. Dare to speak for yourself. Let the other people lie in your blood, but faceless, nameless, diluted, masticated by you, reproduced etc.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write.

Anaïs, I only thought I loved you before; it was nothing like this certainty that's in me now. Was all this so wonderful only because it was brief and stolen? Were we acting for each other, to each other?

What can I do to express fully what I really am?

The secret of my lies must be that which makes for good acting. I never plunge into a lie carelessly, without first telling myself: "How would I feel if this were true?

Cuando uno se hace pasar por las revueltas de cuerpo entero.

Small talk is like the air that shatters the stalactites into dust again. I do not participate. I wait. I laugh. I am aware that shallowness disintegrates the deeper undercurrents everyone seeks. The underground rivers of dreams, of deeper and deeper selves running underneath. I prefer my submarine region.

I smile because I listen to the OTHER and I believe the OTHER. I am a marionette pulled by the unskilled fingers, pulled apart, inharmoniously dislocated, one arm dead, the other rhapsodising in mid-air. I laugh, not when it fits into my talk, but when it fits into the undercurrents of my talk.

Yet my friend Natasha [Troubetskoia]† swears that Dostoevsky was a great liar and you could hardly find a Nastasia, an "idiot," or a Stavrogin in Russia.

Psychoanalysis did save me because it allowed the birth of the real me, a most dangerous and painful one for a woman, filled with dangers; for no one has ever loved an adventurous woman as they have loved adventurous men.

You haven't loved yet... You've only been trying to love; beginning to love. Trust alone is not love, desire alone is not love, illusion is not love, dreaming is not love. All these were paths leading you out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to another, but you never reached the other. You were only on the way.

it is in the moments of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately.

I can only tell you that my surroundings are me. Everything is me, because I have rejected all conventions, the opinion of the world, all its laws. I am not obliged, as you and Jeanne are, to play a social role.

Perhaps we have built a false concept of wholeness and, under the pressure of an artificial unity, people like June explode and fly in all directions. Some day we may be reassembled into a more truthful whole.

We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task.

Sentimentalismo? ¿Romanticismo? Si habla en serio... ¿Por qué dudo de ella? Acaso sea que es muy sensible y la gente hipersensible es falsa cuando los demás dudan de ellos? vacilan. Y dan la impresión de ser insinceros.

Las dos hemos perdido la cabeza –le dije–, pero a veces cuando más cosas revelamos de nosotros mismos menos somos nosotros mismos. Yo ya no intento pensar. Cuando estoy contigo me es imposible. Tú eres como yo, esperando que se presente el momento perfecto, aunque nada de lo que se ha imaginado durante demasiado tiempo puede llegar a ser perfecto en un sentido terrenal.

I have no longer the strength to act what I do not feel.