Quotes About Mask

The future is merely a function of the past. There could be no plan of action tomorrow for a mask that had been alive not yet twenty-four hours. The human social equation, in short, is, like a child, too unrestricted.

I had a terribly bad aftertaste. Just making my face look as if it were new, with my memories and my habits unchanged, was quite like dipping up water with a bottomless dipper. Since I had put a mask over my face, I needed one that would fit my heart. If possible, I wanted to be so perfect in my inventions and my acting as to be undetectable even by a lie detector.

had there not been concealed in my mask from the beginning a scheme of revenge?

The fact has been made clear that your face—the mobile, harmonious type—was a mask too. In short, we are two spots of the same ink. It was not solely my responsibility.

let's try bravely putting out the light. When the lights go out, that's the end of the masquerade ball. In the dark, with neither face nor mask, I should like us to try to reestablish relations with each other. I should like to believe the new melody that comes to me from the darkness.

No matter how many faces I have, there is no changing the fact that I am me. I was just attempting to fill in a too-long intermission in my life with a trivial "masked play.

I wonder whether the nation itself is not an enormous mask intolerant of the rivalry of individual masks.

If one accepted such reasoning, I who had lost my face was destined to be shut up forever in a solitary cell … with no roadway … and so a mask became invested with a terribly profound meaning.

If the convention of the face were empty, perhaps a disguise too was just as empty.

isn't the mask something required mainly by the victim and the disguise, on the contrary, by the assailant?

An affair with you, of course, was the shameless fantasy of the mask. Even though I wanted to feel something, hope for something, attempt something, the poison of jealousy (I had deliberately begun to forget it, though it was the root of all these fancies) recovered its breath and began to check the flow of blood in my veins.

while I pretended to submit reluctantly to the forceful persuasions of the mask, I was covering up to myself the fact that the mask's wish was my own.

what they sold in the bar was the fake mask of alcohol.

I began to toy with the finger of a girl in navy blue seated next to me. No, it was not I, but the mask.

Surely the mask and tattooing have a surprising element in common: they both seek to bring about a transformation by obliterating the real skin. But of course, there were points of difference too. Fundamentally the mask was something removable, but tattooing was assimilated and incorporated into the skin. The mask, moreover, furnished an evasion of reality, but tattooing, of course, was an effort to make oneself obvious and showy.

I was a cuckold present at his wife's adultery. This was a triangular relationship with one actor playing two parts. If one were to make a drawing of "me," "the mask, that is, the other me," and "you," it would be a non-Euclidean triangular relationship, existing on a single straight line.

Although the mask had frantically tried to break down the barrier, you had slipped through it without touching. Like the wind … or a spirit. I do not understand you. Putting you to any further tests would be nothing more than my own destruction.

thanks to the mask, signs of fatigue or shame showed on my face no more than on yours.

The mask, that should be the victor, lay stupidly on the table, like an obscene picture that has drained all one's desire;

The mask was no longer a means by which to get you back, but only a hidden camera through which to watch your betrayal of me. I had made the mask for the purpose of recovering myself. But it had willfully escaped from me and, taking great pleasure in its evasion, had become defiant;

my real face, which was merely an incomplete copy of the mask...

What a surprise attack. To imagine that you perceived that my mask was a mask and nevertheless went on pretending to be deceived.

The former were trompe l'œil doors painted on a wall, but the mask was like a door ajar, through which the fragrance of sunlight is wafted in.

I must be continually alert to the mask, as one is to handling complicated machinery.