Quotes About Authenticity

Despite what I said about staying the way we were, I changed. I, who have always believed in speaking my mind and made it my mission to uncover the truth, have found myself keeping secrets. Sometimes life is more complicated than the simple rules we make for it.

You believe in expressing all feelings at all times, though this has never been a successful practice for you insofar as your feeling-expression resulting in any real change.

So I say, if you are burning, burn. If you can stand it, the shame will burn away and leave you shining, radiant, and righteously shameless

I was grateful for the darkness that hid our faces at least, but nothing can hide the voice. It is always naked.

If you are burning, burn. If you can stand it, the shame will burn away and leave you shining, radiant, and righteously shameless.

Stand true to your calling to be a man. Real women will always be relieved and grateful when men are willing to be men

The thing is, when you're with someone like Poppu - someone who sees straight through your battered facade and loves every bit of you, someone who makes you laugh until you pee your pants, someone who grabs you in a hug exactly when you need it - you don't crave any kind of approval from strangers. You don't need to "matter" in the world, because you already matter to the only person who counts.

Work on what is real rather than worry about what is unreal.

I know I'm not a self-indulgent idiot I also know I'm not the second coming of Deepak Chopra. If I had believed either of those, or both, as some people do when they get famous, that's when the mental illness arrives.

I myself have never been enchanted by the dream of the white wedding, and, heaven help us, the expectation that this exquisitely catered event should be 'the happiest moment' of one's life.

There are times when the only access I have to the truest person that I am is when I'm alone and trying to solve a sentence. It's exciting, even when it's frustrating, even when I can't do it right.

The Bhagavad Gita--that ancient Indian Yogic text--says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.

Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.

And then I say to myself that we should believe in that which we felt when we were strong and happy rather than in that which we feel when we are sick and sad. Do you not think, Judith, that one is more truly oneself in times of joy than in times of sorrow?

Never again, she vowed, would she live a noisy life that killed her dreams. They were her reason for living, the only thing that she had to give to the world, and she must live in the way that suited them best.

Alas, the heart is not a metaphor, or at least not always a metaphor.

A sort of insatiability seems to infect our feelings when we look back on women, particularly on those who are highly interesting and yet whose effort at self-definition through works is fitful, casual, that of an amateur. We are inclined to think they could have done more, that we can make retroactive demands upon them for a greater degree of independence and authenticity.

We look so very different from the way we sound. It's a shock, similar to hearing your own voice for the first time, when you're forced to wonder how the rest of you comes across if you sound nothing like the way you think you sound. You feel dislodged from the old shoe of yourself.

No woman is all sweetness." —Mme. Récamier

I don't say it was likely -- I only say it is true.

Some girls have a real sexy giggle, but whenever I laugh it always comes out somewhere between a bellow and a snort!

Love is neither a conditional business nor an ever-fixed mark arrangement. People always know somewhere inside them if they are not loved. No gestures, talk, conciliation, pronouncements can prevail over that deep instinctual knowledge.

Unless I am what I am and feel what I feel -- as hard as I can and as honestly and truly as I can -- then I am nothing.

Sometimes I think we only imagine ourselves. It's hard sometimes, coming face-to-face with your truer nature -- the part that you conceal, even from yourself.