Quotes About Pretense

I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible.

They feel guilty for having survived so they pretend the bad things never happened Exodus (1960) screenplay

The fable of the Emperor's New Clothes is brought up time and again, a conspiracy to dupe someone, a pretense designed to make the innocent or gullible look stupid. It's a narcissistic paranoia; most artists don't have the time or money to bother playing such a prank and are far more concerned with spending their days pursuing ideas in the studio, however absurd those ideas may appear to others.

The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices.

I loathe and detest people who pretend they don't care what people think about them as if that is a virtue, when it is simply rude.

She felt like a bad actress in a play she never wanted to be in.

A book is a success when people who haven't read it pretend they have.

We're used to the film versions of psychopaths. The clearly crazies. But most psychopaths are clever. They have to be. They know how to mimic human behavior. How to pretend to care, while not actually feeling anything except perhaps rage and an overwhelming and near-perpetual sense of entitlement. That they've been wronged. They get what they want mostly through manipulation.

by parents who tried to pretend their progeny weren't one jelly bean away from Lord of the Flies.

He was like Pinocchio. A man made of wood, mimicking humanity. Shiny and smiling and fake. And if you cut into him you'd see rings. Circles of deceit and scheming and justification. It's what he was made of. That hadn't changed.

Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.

Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretense of it saps the very foundation of character.

She smiled at him as if butter wouldn't melt

a tongue blistered with smiling

The thing about death is that we're all terrified of it happening, and we're devastated when it does, and we go out of our way to pretend that neither of these things is true.

We are never the people we think we are. We are the ones we pretend, with all our hearts we can't become.

Is it better not knowing the ugly truth, and pretending it doesn't exist? Or is it better to confront it, even though the knowledge may be a weight you carry around forever?

What we could not see clearly, we didn't have to pretend to understand.

It was possible, Trixie supposed, that everyone had two faces: Some of us did a better job of hiding it than others.

There's a word we learned in social studies: schadenfreude. It's when you enjoy watching someone else suffer. The real question though, is why? I think part of it is self preservation. And part of it is because a group always feels more like a group when it's banded together against an enemy. It doesn't matter if that enemy has never done anything to hurt you-you just have to pretend you hate someone even more than you hate yourself.

It was not compassion that led to Daniel's change of heart, and it was not kindness. It was realizing that, against all odds, he had something in common with Jason Underhill. Like Daniel, Jason had learned the hard way that they we are never the people we think we are. We are the ones we pretend, with all our hearts, we can't become.

It reminded Lacy of running into someone you hadn't seen for a while, and finding her bald and missing her eyebrows: you knew she was in the throes of chemotherapy, but pretended you didn't, because it was easier that way for both of you.

You can put a pig in a ball gown, Minka. That doesn't make it a debutante.

I think it's rude to stick a smile on your face and pretend you like talking to someone when in reality you'd rather be sticking bamboo slivers under your fingernails.