Quotes About Pretense

You okay?" Anton asks, looking at me like he's trying to figure out if I'm drunk. His plans depend on me. I look as blank as possible and hope that it freaks him out. No point in my being the only miserable one.

You keep talking, but you're not making any sense. Of course you upset someone in the government. You pretended to be the governor of New Jersey and confessed to a bunch of crimes." I can't help the small smile that's playing at the corners of my mouth. "So," I say, "how did it go over?

I cannot help observing that beneath his defiance is fear. I know what it is to say the clever thing because you don't want anyone to know how scared you are. It doesn't make me like him any better, but for the first time he seems real. Not good, but real.

Mortal lives are one long game of make-believe.

These clothes are a costume for me. I am playing dress-up in ignorance

I like you," I tell him. "I like playing pretend with you." "Pretend?" he echoes, as though he's not sure if I'm insulting him. ... "Of course we're pretending! We don't belong together, but it's fun anyway.

I had come to discover that "safe" was an illusion, a pretense that adults wrapped around their children- and sometimes themselves- to make the world seem comfortable. I had discovered that under that thin cover of let's-pretend, monsters and nightmares lay, and that not all of them came from places like the moonroads or the nightling cities. Some of the monsters were people we knew. People we thought we could trust.

Everyone wanted to be rich and beautiful, but the truly rich and beautiful had to pretend they were just the same as everyone else.

She'd swallowed it whole and pretended it meant nothing, and therefore it had come to mean everything.

This was how it could be done. This was how you lived with a terrible secret. You just did it. You pretended everything was fine. You ignored the deep, cramplike pain in your stomach. You somehow anesthetized yourself so that nothing felt that bad, but nothing felt that good either.

Perhaps all grown-ups were just children carefully putting on their grown-up disguises each day and then acting accordingly.

Everyone wanted to be rich and beautiful, but the truly rich and beautiful had to pretend they were just the same as everyone else. Oh, it was a funny old world. "So, school politics, girls," Madeline said as she carefully

They smiled at each other. Jane looked away. She picked up her mug of tea and took a sip even though it was all gone. The doorbell rang. "That will be Celeste," said Madeline. Great, thought Jane, continuing to pretend-sip her empty mug of tea. Now I'll be in the presence of both great love and great beauty.

She hadn't told anyone. She'd swallowed it whole and pretended it meant nothing, and therefore it had come to mean everything.

It seemed to her that everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip down to their souls in front of their long-term partners. It was easier to pretend there was nothing more to know, to fall into an easygoing companionship.

She'd always known her reaction to that night had been too big, or perhaps too small. She hadn't ever cried. She hadn't told anyone. She'd swallowed it whole and pretended it meant nothing, therefore it had come to mean everything.

Everyone wanted to be rich and beautiful, but the truly rich and beautiful had to pretend they were just the same as everyone else. Oh, it was a funny old world.

It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.

It was a skill of mine, splitting myself in half, pretending to be childish and oblivious while shifting through adult exchanges with the focus and discrimination of a forensic detective.

I've lied / to you The same way that I always do This is / the last smile That I'll fake for the sake of being with you

I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.

I did not love running. Here's a pointer for you: no one does. They pretend to, but they are lying. The only good part is having run. In the moment, it's dull and hard as in effortful but not as in difficult to master. It's repetitive. It does not open the floodgates of revelation, as I am you've been led to expect.

They still want credit for being tolerant, without taking the rap for the fact that you only 'tolerate' what you can't stand.

That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretense that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon.