Quotes About Masks

As masks are the sign that there are faces, words are the sign that there are things. And these things are the sign of the incomprehensible.

Pienso que todo ser humano tiene una infinita y callada capacidad para ejercer la violencia, quiéralo o no. Las máscaras ayudan, cubren, tapan, disimulan, pero no la eliminan. Lo que hacen las guerras y las dictaduras es levantar esas máscaras y poner tal virtualidad de manifiesto, permitiendo que aflore en un esplendor desatado; la impunidad lo permite.

For these galas, the Mohaves came together wearing bark masks and face paint or mud-slathered hair, marched upriver to the feasting area, built a fire, and danced until midnight. The next day they ate. The women arrived carrying soup, cakes, or boiled vegetables in dishes and baskets on their heads. Their cakes were made of ground wheat and boiled pumpkin rolled into a dough that was placed in the sand, covered with a leaf, and baked.

Gezichten kennen vele mimieken, die allemaal wel iets weergeven van wat daarachter leeft, maar het evengoed kunnen vertekenen.

On Halloween, the parents sent their kids out looking like me.

It has always been thus, that the mundane masks the magnificent in us.

Spiderman and Superman were closeted bodybuilders: they wore bodysuits that decently covered their flesh and masks that disguised their identity; their lives were rigidly divided between body-less bourgeois respectability and muscular super-hero fantasy; they led a 'double-life' that no one knew about and were never to be seen at the gym.

You know the oxygen masks on airplanes? I don't think there's really any oxygen. I think they're just to muffle the screams.

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.

We only have so many faces in our pockets

You ever see a man who doesn't know he's unhappy, Leopard? Look for it in the scars on his woman's face. Or in the excellence of his woodcraft and iron making, or in the masks he makes to wear himself because he forbids the world to see his own face. I am not happy, Leopard. But I am not unhappy that I know.

You only saw the side of people that they wanted you to show, learnt the details of their lives they were willing to reveal. Everyone kept secrets. - Pg. 222

We are afraid, for example, of letting others know more about us than we know about ourselves, fearing most of all that our masks will slip, and will lose control, letting others see us as we truly are.

Why couldn't people just be who they were? Womanizers, drinkers, liars, and manipulators, instead of pretending around it all, hiding the secrets like dirty laundry stuffed under a bed, and then dying, so the grieving got whammed with two losses—the flesh-and-blood bodies and the images they thought they knew.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

The sense that we are only the sum of our parts—whatever we achieve, however we appear, whatever we own, however we try to prove ourselves—is not a good sense. It's an existential crisis: Do I even exist? If you take away the masks I wear, is there only blank space underneath?

All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

What lies behind two such expert poker faces? I wonder. For different reasons, for reasons professional or emotional, they likely have spent most or all of their lives wearing masks, cool and aloof and impenetrable. It serves them in the lab, in the research community, in our profession. It serves them, period. Not me. Not me.

A government which is not liked by the artists is certainly a bad government, because artist sees very well what is behind the masks!

Master Seneca says that 'No one can wear a mask for very long.' This is true; but someone can wear different masks for very long!

The world is full up with the talented impersonators of the Devil!

Everyone has three hearts - one they show to strangers, one they show to the people they love, and the last one that isn't shown to anyone...the one that's normally most damaged,

Chi siamo davvero? E se la verità fosse altrove, diversa rispetto a quello che pensiamo? E se la parte autentica di ognuno di noi fosse nascosta proprio finché ci sforziamo di controllare tutto, perché ci sono tante cose da fare e non possiamo permetterci il lusso di essere, semplicemente essere, stanchi, depressi, svogliato, capricciosi, noiosi, persino sbagliati e dementi, ecco sì, questo: dementi?

I was) slightly suspicious of these babbling children of intellectuals who were themselves babblers, my schoolmates who had already produced the next senile generation . . . I had noticed that behind their masks people were actually unhelpful, cold, brutally indifferent toward everything that at the moment did not fall within the sphere of their immediate interest.