Quotes About Pretense

Comfort and reassurance and a wordless understanding that there is always darkness. In some part of us, there is absolute darkness, as much as we wish otherwise. As much as we pretend otherwise. Anders shifts

The Wizard of Oz was a humbug. He's not great and powerful. He just pretends to be great and powerful. The Wicked Witch of the West is greater and powerfuller. She's got flying monkeys. She's like a mad scientist. She even has a secret weakness. Water is like Kryptonite to her.

But a system made secure by the protective plating of humor and pretense always runs the risk of having its protection get out of hand. A relationship based on jokes invites jokes; jokes about anything -- and jokes about anything are now and then bound to cut too close to the truth.

Wieczorem w przeddzieÅ" wyprawy le?aÅ'em w Å'ó?ku, rozmyÅ›lajÄ…c o mojej gÅ'uchocie, o latach udawania , ?e nie sÅ'yszÄ™ ani sÅ'owa, i zastanawiaÅ'em siÄ™, czy potrafiÅ'bym siÄ™ zachowywa? inaczej. A potem przypomniaÅ'em sobie, ?e to nie ja zaczÄ…Å'em udawa? gÅ'uchego, to ludzie zaczÄ™li traktowa? mnie jak durnia, który nie sÅ'yszy, nie widzie i nie potrafi wydusi? z siebie sÅ'owa.

Humility is often a false front we employ to gain power over others.

What is fear but that 'thing' that we believed to be as powerful as it pretended to be.

Their sighing, canting, grace-proud faces, their three-mile prayers, and half-mile graces.

So, rather than appear foolish afterward, I renounce seeming clever now.

Tall, black-haired, rouged, Kaiser-moustached, he cackled and screamed in weird attitudes, giggling in high soprano, hiding his little black teeth behind an exquisitely gloved hand - the 'poseur' absolute. He was said to have slept with Sarah Bernhard and vomited for a week afterwards.

To show an unfelt sorrow is an officeWhich the false man does easy.

Away, and mock the time with fairest show:False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

There are a sort of men whose visagesDo cream and mantle like a standing pond.

O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I.

Good now, play one sceneOf excellent dissembling, and let it lookLike perfect honor.

To put an antic disposition on.

It was always the same: everywhere there were the hard-hearted who pretended an interest, who began a conversation and then, their cadging over, walked away.

When aren't we acting?' he asked in his diary. 'When aren't we concealing? Would you like me to have been a fly on your wall yesterday? Did you do nothing shameful? Of course you did. The version of ourselves that we present to the world bears no resemblence to the truth. If we knew the truth about each other we could take noone seriously. There isn't one of us who could afford to be caught. That's all life is. Trying not to be found out.

So if I'm not normal and you're not normal and they're not normal—why in the blue blazes do we all spend so much time pretending we are?

I'll never find out now What A. thought of me. If B. ever forgave me in the end. Why C. pretended everything was fine. What part D. played in E.'s silence. What F. had been expecting, if anything. Why G. forgot when she knew perfectly well. What H. had to hide. What I. wanted to add. If my being around meant anything to J. and K. and the rest of the alphabet.

Having spent time around "sinners" and also around purported saints, I have a hunch why Jesus spent so much time with the former group: I think he preferred their company. Because the sinners were honest about themselves and had no pretense, Jesus could deal with them. In contrast, the saints put on airs, judged him, and sought to catch him in a moral trap. In the end it was the saints, not the sinners, who arrested Jesus.

Then growing up is not a matter of discovering who or what one really is, but joining the general amnesia whereby each of us pretends to be an autonomous person and learns how to play the social game of constantly reassuring each other that, yes, you are a person, just like me, and I'm okay, you're okay.

As she took each step a little bubble of wind puffed out of her saggy bottom. It sounded like a duck quacking. Either she didn't realise or was extremely good at pretending she didn't realise.

John claims that here he told the guards that he could not speak English and when this failed to persuade them, he faked a violent seizure.

Some people are so fake, when they die another person's life flashes before their eyes